NEW YORK NEW YORK A SERIES OF WOOD ENGRAVINGS IN COLOUR AND A NOTE ON COLOUR PRINTING BY RUDOLPH RUZICKA WITH PROSE IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITY BY WALTER PRICHARD EATON NEW YORK THE GROLIER CLUB 1915 s £7 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE CITY 01" NEW YORK MAY -4 1915 ©3I.A:J97840 V ^ to TABLE OF CONTENTS A NOTE ON COLOUR PRINTING xi I A NEW ANSWER TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE 3 II AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 15 III THE RRIDGES 27 IV THE OLD TOWN 39 V THE SQUARES 51 VI FIFTH AVENUE 63 VII BROADWAY 75 VIII RIVERSIDE DRIVE 87 IX KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 99 X THE END OF THE ISLAND 111 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS I DOWNTOWN, A VIEW FROM UNION SQUARE 3 RROAD STREET AT WALL 7' RROADWAY FROM THE POST-OFFICE 12 II NEW YORK FROM RROOKLYN 15 MUNICIPAL OFFICE RUILDING IN CONSTRUCTION 19 : WEST STREET 24 III EAST RIVER RRIDGES 27 QUEENSBORO' BRIDGE 31 - HIGH BRIDGE 36 IV ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL IN VARICK STREET 39 WASHINGTON SQUARE 43 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, CHELSEA 48 V FOURTH AVENUE AT UNION SQUARE 51 MADISON SQUARE 55 QUAKER MEETING HOUSE, STUYVESANT SQUARE 60 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VI FIFTH AVENUE 63 THE PLAZA 67 CENTRAL PARK 72 VII TIMES SQUARE 75 RROADWAY FROM HERALD SQUARE 79 THE PASSING OF THE RROWNSTONE DWELLING 84 VIII RIVERSIDE DRIVE PARK 87 THE VIADUCT 91 HARLEM CLIFFS 96 IX CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE 99 COLUMRIA UNIVERSITY 103 FOUNTAIN IN THE UNIVERSITY PARK 108 X "ITALIAN INFORMAL GARDENS" 111 THE HARLEM RIVER 115 FORT GEORGE 120 A NOTE ON COLOUR PRINTING A NOTE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF COLOUR PRINTING FROM WOOD ENGRAVINGS An instinctive love of colour often found expression in the art of wood engraving, as it did in all arts. The ear- liest examples of European wood engraving, dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, were pictures of sacred subjects cut in bold outlines on blocks of wood and impressed on paper by means of rubbing. Their popular appeal, apart from the subject, rested, no doubt, in their bright colours, applied by hand with the aid of brushes and stencils. This method of colouring continued in use long after the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, and although even then efforts were made to print colours from wood blocks, they sel- dom remained unassisted by the colourist's hand, so that colour printing proper may be said to begin with the invention of engraving and printing in a manner called "chiaroscuro" or "clair-obscur." This took place at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury in Germany, where wood engraving in black and white and printing on the hand press had already reached a great height of perfection. The earlier efforts in colour printing, such as the perfectly impressed initial in Fust and Schoeffer's Psalter (1457), Ratdolt's Sphaera Mundi xii A NOTE ON of Sacrobosco (1485), the Book of St. Albans (1486) and the more elaborate Book of Hours of Jean du Pre (1490), were confined to simple, flat colouring of outline blocks of initials, heraldic shields, diagrams and, in the last in- stance, of borders. It remained for the great German wood engravers of the sixteenth century to extend colour printing to pictures. At first the chiaroscuro was hardly more than a repro- duction of a pen drawing made on coloured paper and heightened with gold, silver or white. Indeed, in the first example of a print of that kind, Cranach's St. George (1507), the procedure is identically the same as that which an artist might follow: a solid tone of colour, blue in this instance, was spread upon a sheet of paper, on which, an outline engraving in black being first im- pressed, the high lights were added in gold from a second block. In another example of the same print, the high lights are printed in a kind of white substance, probably intended to hold gold or silver. Possibly the difficulty of representing high lights in this fashion led to the next step, which was to establish definitely the method of making chiaroscuros: the printing over all the paper of a tint block which was solid except for the incisions indi- cating the high lights. This did away with the necessity of painting a tint over the paper and obviated the diffi- culty of properly registering the accents of light, giving, besides, the advantage of white paper showing through the incisions. Jost de Negker, a native of Antwerp, is credited with having invented this technically direct method at Augsburg in 1508. It is certain that he carried it to great perfection in his engravings after Burgkmair. COLOUR PRINTING xiii Besides Cranach in Wittemberg and Burgkmair in Augs- burg, Hans Baldung Grien employed the method in Stras- burg about the year 1510, as did Johann Waechtlin, an Alsatian painter and engraver who lived in Strasburg between the years 1509 and 1519. In some prints by Waechtlin, who engraved his own designs, and notably in the Baumgartner portrait by Jost de Negker after Burgkmair, the black outline block is abandoned, the darkest tone being a dark gray, used to accentuate the shadows only. A tint of intermediate value is utilized for most of the detail; this tint and the dark gray are im- pressed one after another upon the lightest tint which serves for the high lights. A greater unity of effect was thus obtained and the quality of low relief, a character- istic of the chiaroscuro print, further emphasized. In view of the early German work described, the claim made that Ugo da Carpi was the inventor of engraving and printing in chiaroscuro has but little ground, in spite of Vasari's assurance and the grant to Ugo in 1516 of copyright privileges by the Venetian Senate. The year 1516 is the date of the first print known to have been exe- cuted by him in a manner which is the same as the ear- lier northern work. Yet it is certain that Ugo, himself a painter, introduced the art into Italy, and, inspired by such masters as Raphael, Titian and Parmegiano, whose drawings he reproduced, brought the art to its highest development. This may be observed in what is perhaps the most spirited of his chiaroscuros, the "Diogenes" after Parmegiano, for which four blocks were used. The colours of this print, while kept in the consistently low key of gray greens employed in a manner not unlike that xiv A NOTE ON of the Baumgartner portrait, are boldly treated in sweep- ing lines and broad masses. The substitution for the black key block of dark gray or black spots used for shadows and a greater variety of colours employed in broad masses, are the characteristics of the best prints by Ugo da Carpi and his followers, An- tonio da Trento and Giuseppe Nicolo Vicentino, pupils of Parmegiano. Their prints more nearly approach reproductions of oil paintings; certain crudenesses in execution, as well as the scale in which they were often made, also suggest their use as wall decoration. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Andrea Andreani of Mantua published many chiaroscuros, some of his own workmanship, often prints of great size divided into sec- tions, others reprints from old blocks (into which he in- serted his own mark) by Ugo da Carpi, da Trento, Vicen- tino and Alessandro Ghadini. Bartolomeo Coriolano of Bologna, in his engravings after Guido Reni which re- sembled the early German work in their black outlines and brown tints, carried the technique into the middle of the seventeenth century, adding nothing new to it, in spite of the huge dimensions of prints which won him public recognition and honours. In Germany, the race of Great and Little Masters having come to an end, the art of wood engraving in gen- eral declined, the refinements of the copper plate re- placing it in popular favour. The first use of the copper plate in connection with blocks engraved for chiaroscuro printing and also the first appearance in any form of the chiaroscuro as book illustration, is found in Hubert Goltzius' "Lives of the COLOUR PRINTING xv Roman Emperors," a book published at Antwerp in 1557. The illustrations consist of portraits designed to imitate medallions, the outlines etched on copper and printed over two tones of sepia, these evidently printed from blocks which were engraved in relief. Hendrick, an- other member of the Goltzius family and a noted copper engraver, executed a number of chiaroscuro prints in the pure wood-block method. The influence of the suave copper-engraved line is in evidence in the black key blocks of his oval prints, designs of mythological sub- jects. Of simpler character are the few charming land- scapes Goltzius engraved in black line and two tones of colour. Equally well known, though of no greater technical interest, are the chiaroscuros by Christopher Jegher, made after designs which Rubens himself is said to have drawn on the wood. Jegher also engraved en- tirely on wood in black outline and a brown tint a "Lives of the Roman Emperors" for an edition published by Moretus at Antwerp in 1645. Jan Lievens, the only one of the school of Rembrandt to engrave on wood, designed and engraved a number of fine portraits, making happy use in some of them of a second block printed in brown. The brown colour, em- ployed in some of the earliest German chiaroscuros and often chosen for prints in one tone and black, was also used by Paul Moreelse, the painter and architect, in the two graceful prints made by him in 1612. Some small chiaroscuros of much charm were produced in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, probably by the painter Abraham Rloemaert. Many of his designs were engraved by his son Frederick, in black outlines etched xvi A NOTE ON on copper and coloured by tones of brown from the wood, a style that was to find even greater favour later in the eighteenth century. Elisha Kirkall, born in Sheffield about 1682, was the first English chiaroscurist. This versatile engraver pro- duced twelve large colour prints between 1722 and 1724. Though inspired in subject by the early Italian work, his colour prints were really mezzotints over an etched ground, to which tones of sepia were added from blocks engraved in relief. The traditional method of making colour prints was temporarily revived in Venice by that talented amateur, Count Antonio Maria Zanetti, who en- graved and published in 1749 a collection of chiaroscuros after drawings by Parmegiano and other old masters. More important were the efforts made in Venice by the Englishman J. B. Jackson, the alleged pupil of Kirkall, to print in colours from the wood. Count Zanetti was prob- ably instrumental in acquainting Jackson with the best examples of the Italian work, when the latter came to Venice after his rather unsuccessful attempt to practise wood engraving in Paris. His large prints after the old masters, produced in Venice (1744) in the usual manner, are of smaller significance than his endeavours, in a series of landscapes, to print pictures in their "proper colours" — in colours that are independent of the values of light and shade. Such a departure from the traditional use of colour in this branch of the graphic arts may have been due in some measure to the recurrent experiments in colour printing from plates engraved in intaglio, of which the most remarkable was the application to the mezzotint process of the three-colour principle by Le COLOUR PRINTING xvii Blon, demonstrated by him in Holland in 1704 and later exploited in England. Returning to England in 1746, Jackson tried the manufacture of wall paper, utilizing his knowledge of colour printing to this end. It was mainly for the advertising of this unsuccessful venture that he published, in 1754, "An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro . . . the Ap- plication of it to the making Paper Hangings of taste . . ." Of all the English chiaroscurists, Jackson went farthest in colour experiments, claiming with some justice in his Essay the invention of "ten positive tints, whereas Hugo di Carpi only knew four." Nicholas Le Sueur, the last of a long line of wood en- gravers, was the chief exponent of the chiaroscuro in France. His work in that method may best be studied in the pretentious "Recueil d'Estampes," reproductions of pictures in the great French collections, the publication of which was begun in 1729 by M. A. de Crozat. In the two parts that were issued, besides the numerous copper engravings, there are about thirty large prints in chiaros- curo, some engraved by Le Sueur entirely on wood, the rest in the popular combination of the etched black out- line printed from copper plates which Count de Caylus engraved, to which tones of colour were added from blocks furnished by Le Sueur. Contemporary with him and also the last and most famous of generations of wood engravers, Jean Baptiste Papillon had an enthusi- astic love for his art. Besides engraving a vast num- ber of book decorations and illustrations, many of which he designed, he also wrote, in the course of some thirty years, the "Traite Historique et Pratique de la Gravure xviii A NOTE ON en Bois," which was published in 1766 in two volumes. His enthusiasm for the art led him into some fantastic statements in the "Traite Historique," but the second volume, "Traite Pratique," devoted to the technique as practised before the burin came into general use, shows Papillon's great knowledge of his craft. The second vol- ume also contains a valuable description of the manner of engraving and printing chiaroscuros and is accom- panied by a suite of four progressive proofs and the completed print, the whole excellently demonstrating the process. The refinements of copper engraving completely dom- inated wood engraving in the eighteenth and indirectly the greater part of the nineteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century the wood engraver tried hard to imitate the delicate effects of copper engraving, until, in the nineteenth, he nearly succeeded in this by accepting the burin, the tool that had hitherto been employed on metal alone. The Le Blon three-colour method already alluded to found some imitators, though a more popular medium for the colour print was the stipple engraving. The common mode of engraving being on copper, wood was sometimes resorted to in the futile efforts made to imitate the early Italian chiaroscurists — the original method of producing chiaroscuros, by means of wood blocks alone, was practised only in the spirit of a "lost art" by a few devoted amateurs of engraving. The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the birth of lithography, in which experiments in colour were al- most immediately tried. But before they achieved the commercial success which in our own time was so com- COLOUR PRINTING xix pletely eclipsed by the photo-mechanical processes, much had been accomplished in colour printing from wood engravings. The already mentioned attempt made by Jackson in the previous century, to print "proper col- ours" from wood, was probably the first effort of the sort in Europe. Excepting the work of the little known German engraver F. W. Gubitz, which Bewick praises so highly in his "Memoir," practically nothing further was attempted until Savage's important experiments. The researches into the making of coloured printing inks and their improvement led William Savage, a printer who settled in London in 1797, to the application of colours to book illustrations and decorations, and to the reproduction of drawings and water colours. These experiments were published by Savage in his "Practical Hints on Decorative Printing" between the years 1818 and 1823. Covering the traditional chiaroscuro method by examples and by the translation of Papillon's de- scription of the process, Savage also demonstrated the feasibility of reproducing paintings in water colours, choosing for his purpose some characteristic English water colours executed in flat, definite washes. For each one of these washes, or tones of colour, a block was en- graved and the design built up by successive impres- sions. While Savage was remarkably successful in ren- dering the values and effects of water colours executed in flat washes, in undertaking the reproduction of paint- ings in full modeling, he could not but fail, as in the one instance, where he used twenty-nine different blocks. The method often employed in the eighteenth cen- tury of copper plates used in connection with blocks xx A NOTE ON engraved in relief (Kirkall, Le Sueur, etc.), Jackson's endeavours to imitate paintings in their true colours and Savage's more successful achievements along similar lines, were adroitly combined and popularized by George Baxter after the year 1834. Baxter employed for the key plates sometimes mezzotint or aquatint, sometimes lithography. The colour applied to these key plates was no longer that of the chiaroscuro.but of full colour value, such as Jackson strove for and Savage succeeded in pro- ducing. During some twenty-five years, Baxter manu- factured and published a great quantity of these prints, to which, owing to the many processes promiscuously employed, the name "Baxter print" seems to be the fit- ting one to apply. Among the over-illustrated gift books of the fifties and sixties, it is refreshing to come upon the work of Edmund Evans, who began his career as colour printer in 1851. Although his early work was in the elab- orate style of colour printing then popular, he never combined with wood engraving methods foreign to it. In the seventies such artists as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway found at his Racquet Court Press faithful interpretation for their charming books for children. As the engraver became increasingly more able to re- produce any effect of the brush, so also he became more subservient to the artist, both losing regard for the es- sential qualities of wood engraving. The early chiar- oscuro print and the better known Japanese colour print (which it is beyond the scope of this note to describe) have a charm due to the direct means employed and to a close understanding between the artist and the en- COLOUR PRINTING xxi graver. The development of the European method of colour printing from the wood was often interrupted by the introduction of new methods of engraving; with the invention of the lithographic and the mechanical processes, the art practically ceased to be practised. In Japan, on the other hand, colour printing enjoyed a con- tinual development, from its origin in the early part of the eighteenth to its decline in the sixties of the nine- teenth century. The rich results of this uninterrupted development of the Japanese print captivated the Eu- ropean artist when he became acquainted with it in the eighties and nineties. Already the artist in Europe, whose relation to the graphic arts has always been inti- mate, had begun to turn to wood with new interest. The discovery of the Japanese print and study of the older European traditions of colour printing encouraged him to experiment more freely in a medium which was then in the hands of experts who competed in vain with the photo-mechanical processes. The artist himself now turned to wood, engraving his own designs, experiment- ing not only in black and white, but in colour as well. Some results of this artistic enterprise may be seen in many of the best books published in Europe within the last fifteen years. The exposition of the "Societe de la Gravure sur Bois Originale" in Paris in 1912, to which forty-one artist-engravers contributed over two hundred and sixty-six exhibits, and the more recent Exposition of Graphic Arts at Leipsic have clearly demonstrated that there is new vitality in the art, the traditions of which extend over five centuries. R.R. I A NEW ANSWER TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE I A NEW ANSWER TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE With the birth and rapid growth of the skyscraper in the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century began the transformation of many an American city; and now, as we enter the second decade of the Twentieth Century, we are confronted with the necessity for new definitions of architectural effectiveness and even of beauty. This 4 NEW YORK is, indeed, an age of redefinition. We are redefining Liberty in America, or attempting to, and Society and Duty. The phrase "Big Business" has leapt into the language, because the thing itself has shot up into the economic structure, even as our skyscrapers have shot up on every street, and with the problems "Big Busi- ness" presents we are now wrestling. All these prob- lems, these demands for redefinition, social, economic, aesthetic, are most insistent, not to say clamorous, on Manhattan Island. Our greatest contrasts of rich and poor, our biggest business, our tallest skyscrapers, our most chaotic jumbles of architectural styles and archi- tectural levels, our most strident individualism, are found in the old city of New York, the heart of the greater city which since 1898 has included Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. A rib of rock between two riv- ers, the pigmy Man has swarmed over and under our Island; he has bored through its bowels, and piled it thick with mortared mountains, and from its sides flung leaping spans of steel across the sundering waters. Through the canons he has made, Man hustles and bus- tles, creating more perplexities than he can solve, very little concerned with the beauty or ugliness of it all, a pragmatical pigmy, intent upon the hour and the "cash value" thereof. Yet what he has made smites mightily on every sense, and in reflective mood one seeks to find the secret of its charm, for charm it has to any not blind- ed by convention, the convention of level sky line and architectural uniformity. Most of us who call ourselves New Yorkers, and are secretly proud to call ourselves such however much we A NEW ANSWER 5 may publicly revile our city, have at one time or another approached Manhattan in a spirit of wonder and adven- ture; each one "cometh from afar," on the search for fame or fortune in this commercial metropolis by the sea. Some, babbling alien tongues, come up the Bay on great ships, and their first sight of New York is the strange spectacle of mortared Himalayas rising from the water. Some come from staid New England villages or rolling farms or the freedom of the West. Their trains draw in to the city through the urban spawn of factories, shanties, tenements, which spread for miles over the surrounding country. I think I shall never forget the morning I drew near New York. Fresh from college, high hearted, hopeful, I left Boston by a midnight train, and awoke in the Bronx. I lay in my berth and drew up the shade. We were passing along an embankment, through a wilderness of tenements. Close beside the track, they flashed by in never ceasing procession, broken at regular intervals by the vista of a cross street showing them in endless perspective to the west, and broken between streets at regular intervals by the clothes-wells behind, hung layer on layer with garments, like a strange gar- den. It has amused me since to hear those garments called "the short and simple flannels of the poor" (by Oliver Herford, of course); but I found no amusement in them that morning. High-hearted hope was suddenly dead within me. A great homesickness for a green New England village filled my bosom, and a great sense of depression. Such miles on miles of ugly dwellings, cave dwellings where people lived in layers! Such barren, dirty streets, with never a touch of green! Such a mighty 6 NEW YORK swarming of humanity! The very mass of it bore down upon me like a weight. Who was I amid these millions? We rushed into the tunnel, not then equipped with elec- tric power, and the smell of smoke and gas sickened me. Yet I came out of the station into the gracious, beautiful residential streets on Murray Hill, and smelled the lilacs abloom on Park Avenue. My spirits revived with that fa- miliar odour. I looked about me anew at the city I was to call my home, and the wonder of it then has never left me, nor the charm. The wonder is the constant marvel at its size. The charm is compounded of many elements, of the size again, of the variety, of the ceaseless play of light and shadow, haze and clarity, of the dominant utility at unexpected corners laid suddenly low by beauty, of the endless surprises to the pictorial sense, of the cosmopoli- tanism of it all, the hurry and strut and bustle, the never ending ground stream of a variegated humanity, flowing through open square and deep-sunk canon, at once cre- ator and dependent — midgets who have moulded moun- tains and who have then been moulded by them, played upon by the environment they have created, till they are shaped into the New Yorker of today, striving yet self- satisfied, ardent yet smug, clever yet lacking in sensi- tiveness, American yet of every race under heaven. For more than a decade since those lilacs on Murray Hill woke hope again in my bosom, I have worked and wandered in New York, I have watched it in all seasons and at all hours, I have seen old buildings fall and new and greater ones arise as if by magic almost in a night, I have fought my own little battles in its social life and * Y *°A r V v> o o "* # A s ^ Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. ^ A A S Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. A NEW ANSWER 9 joyed in them, and loved the little corner of the town where I lived almost as one loves the village of his birth. In the great chaos of our town I have found endless charm, and beauties recognized and conventional as well as beauties new and perplexing. To write of them is a pleasure, for to write of them is to share them. The city is, supposedly, preeminently social. It is to the country we turn for those aesthetic satisfactions which come to the spirit through the pictorial sense. That is sometimes a grave mistake, for to those of us who are of necessity city pent it brings only fret and longing. Stone walls do not a prison make to him who can find in Madi- son Square at twilight a Japanese screen of Gargantuan proportions or at his feet see unexpectedly a modern skyscraper looking at its own reflection in a forest pool — the Plaza Hotel all agleam when evening comes, mir- rored on the lake in Central Park. Indeed, we have but to look with George Washington from the steps of the Sub-Treasury and see the classic white columns of the Stock Exchange rising out of a black sea of humanity like a Venetian palace from its canal, to find in the busi- est mart, where the human press is thickest, a stirring challenge to pictorial enjoyment. Perhaps, after all, the ultimate secret of New York's charm is found in this element of surprise; on a scale that almost overpowers, the sudden revelation comes, amid apparent ugliness, of the magnificently pictorial. The contrast is always acci- dental, always unpremeditated. The city grew like a windsown garden, and nameless flowers from far away startle amid the weeds. No well trained municipal gar- dener would plant a skyscraper beside a brown stone 10 NEW YORK dwelling, of course. Therefore he would never achieve that tower against the twilight sky, pricked out with golden squares of light! We cannot do without our towers in New York, and our city would be pictorially the poorer if we could. May it not be that we have too long and too exclusively looked for the elements of beauty in what pleases the eye with symmetry or soothes it with conformity, and looked not enough in what rouses the eye to keener attention and through the eye reaches the centres of suggestion, kindling the imagina- tion? Certainly the value to the human spirit of a sight which wakes his faculties, which causes him to wonder, to speculate, to see beyond the immediate object, to think a thousand correlated thoughts, is as great as the sight which brings the familiar pleasure of "beauty," not as it is defined, for no two definitions are alike, but as it is generally understood and felt. Keats, enthusi- astically racing round the logical circle, said truth is beauty, beauty truth. But what is truth? Wherein does the truth of a Grecian urn consist, or of an ode upon it? Surely, the conquering charm of Keats' Ode, at any rate, lies in its recreation for the reader, not of the urn itself, but of that "little town by river or sea-shore" in the placid, crystalline atmosphere of the Greece of long ago, the Greece of glorifying fable. So, when our towering buildings pile up into ranges and bring to us the sense of canon-cleft and summit, of mass and depth, of Na- ture's own magnificence, who shall say they are not, for all their dumb unconsciousness, singing an ode in stone? What matters it how the result is achieved? The end is all, the effect upon the human soul. Why must we be A NEW ANSWER 11 always viewing buildings as little habitations laid out on little plans to be looked at in conventional pattern? New York is too large, too strange, for that. It is the arch architectural insurgent. Why, indeed, may this same strangeness not be ad- mitted as a possible element even of conventional beauty? We long ago admitted it in literature, per- suaded by the Romanticists, by Whitman, by Ibsen, by all the great insurgent poets. Who now denies that "Peer Gynt" or "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" is poetry? The critic of architecture may still call one of our skyscrapers ugly, as many critics have, considered apart from its setting and compared to Le Petit Trianon or Brunelleschi's Dome. But to this modern echo of the Edinburgh reviewers we reply that our skyscraper was never intended to produce the same effect as Bru- nelleschi's Dome, nor to serve the same purpose; and, furthermore, it is not in isolation that we view it. It was created to lift story upon story that space might be econ- omized, and the effect sought was vertical impressive- ness. We view it as one of the great crags in the walls of a man-made canon, and there it fills its place with admirable strength and uprightness. Certainly no such cliffs were ever before reared by Man; they seem less the work of Man, indeed, than of Nature, and at least we must grant to this mass effect the beauty of a natural wonder, if not of architectural symmetry. They are strange, these towering buildings; they rouse the senses like mountains, composing into Babylonic mass and fir- ing the imagination as only sheer height and size can do; over them the smoke plumes play, and through their 12 NEW YORK hazy canons the red rays of sunset shoot; and they are beautiful. Let us not quarrel longer with definitions, but go among the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and enjoy. II AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS II AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS If you journey into the Berkshire Hills and climb Tom Ball Mountain, you will look down its steep western slope into a half wild intervale, with a few farm houses here and there like toys in their green clearings, and the farmer, like an ant, crawling in a pasture. At the base of the slope, almost under your feet, is an abandoned quarry. From this quarry came the stone to build the New York City Hall, exactly one century ago. You do not see it from the mountain top; Nature has covered its scar. But over the Alford intervale and the nearer hills you see along the horizon the blue wall of the Catskills, dome after dome like a procession of phantom drome- 16 NEW YORK daries. The scene, probably, was not materially differ- ent in 1812, save for a greater quantity of evergreen tim- ber on the hill slopes, and a bit more bustle in the valley, where ox teams hauled the quarried stone away toward the Hudson River. But what a change the century has wrought in the scene about the building which this Berkshire marble built! The New York City Hall, possessing a certain delicate elegance combined with firmness and dignity — a type of that colonial architecture which was at its height in the early days of our republic and may still be seen on an extensive scale in Salem and Portsmouth and Newburyport — looked toward the Battery across a wedge-shaped green park, and its northward face was built of sandstone, since it seemed incredible that the town would pass by it to view it from the rear. Its tower, and the spires of the churches to the south, dominated the scene. Near by was the Park Theatre, and the masts of the shipping on the two river fronts were no doubt visible from its cupola. Now, no less delicately elegant but dingier, its marble yellowed by age like the files of an ancient newspaper, the City Hall sits like Truth at the bottom of a well, a well made by the lofty walls of the surrounding skyscrapers, its green park long since chopped in half, its graceful cupola dwarfed, its view restricted to the rear of the Post Office and a rift of sky. If you climb to the top of the new Woolworth Building tower on the corner of Broadway and Park Place, al- most eight hundred feet above the street level, you will look down upon this little edifice of a century ago from a height as great as the summit of Tom Ball Mountain AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 17 above the Alford quarry. Burrowing in mines, chiseling in quarries, forging in shops, the pigmy Man has emerged to build a mountain himself, whence he may view his handiwork of the past reduced to a marble toy, with Lilliputians like black ants running in and out of it, as small as the Alford farmer. Behind the City Hall, rearing up in gigantic mockery, yet with subtle flattery in its imitation, now stands the new municipal office building. It is as unlike the old Hall as the mountain cliff is unlike the pretty, fern cov- ered boulder at its base, yet it consciously reproduces, so far as a forty story skyscraper can, the colonial design, especially the cupola tower, and with its curving wings seems to embrace the elder structure and the green park at its feet, as some great head wall of a mountain cleft embraces the last oasis of verdure before the leap to snow line. Confronted by this strange con- trast of the centuries, the beholder pauses in silence, thinking, it may be, of the two types of life these two structures represent, regretting a little, it is quite pos- sible, the lost charm of a vanished day, but unable, none the less, to resist the tremendous impressiveness of that huge head wall, the more tremendous for the last oasis of verdure at its feet. Our architecture has left the val- ley. There is a different standard for the peak. Propor- tion, detail, suavity are left behind. Sheer bulk and upward sweep now take hold on our senses. The inter- est has shifted. Yet charm remains, more primitive, perhaps, and wilder — a curious paradox after a century of civilization and "progress"! Colour remains, also, or is added in greater abundance, 18 NEW YORK and the lack of light and shadow which we deplore in the single building of modern steel construction is magnifi- cently supplied by the mass. Look down Broadway or Nassau Street, and see how a cornice lays a great oblique belt of dusky purple down the canon wall across the way, while farther on, facing the opening of a cross street, this same wall leaps at you with a dazzle of white. When the sun rises behind lower Manhattan the specta- tor on the River or the Jersey shore sees the cross streets as deep gulfs of molten gold, and each building, sharply outlined in the new-washed air, bears its steam plumes like salmon streamers high aloft, while every divergence of building material tells as an individual note of colour. The New York atmosphere, indeed, is sharp and unpol- luted by soft coal smoke much of the time, and from the gray street haze and the parti-coloured pedestrians, street cars, and shop windows, up along towering walls of red and white and brown and yellow to the gay flags and the slit of blue sky, the entire panorama of the Lower Town is spread in a thousand tints, with another thou- sand yet of transforming shadows. How many of us, none the less, see it drab, a sort of asphalt tone! It is surprising, indeed, to find how few New Yorkers are aware of the fact that our atmosphere is peculiarly sharp, bringing out sharp colours. When Sorolla, the Spanish painter, said the New York atmosphere was that of the Spanish coast in which he made his dazzling snap- shots of sun and skies and vivid costumes, we listened incredulous. We are even more incredulous when told that our town is rich in colour. Yet we have only to look upward, and the colour is there. From the North River * Y * °A Y* V V> o o ^ Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. * Y *°A r V S o z: o + tc ^ ^ \ Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 21 ferries, for instance, we may see the green of the Rat- tery Park, the Indian red of the last sentinel skyscraper, the white of the West Street Ruilding with its aspiring lines and its flashing, sea-green roof, the red of the Singer Tower, the milky white of the City Investment Building next door, the gold of the "World" dome, the dusky browns and reds of ferry slips and the orange of freight houses by the water front, and over all the sun-tinted steam plumes and the clarion crimson of a hundred flags. Sir Martin Conway once suggested that the skyscraper frames should be walled by coloured tiles, arranged, perhaps, in formal patterns, to give the Lower Town a Babylonic magnificence. But we have all the colour now that is required for beauty, achieved in more seemly fashion. Necessity was the earthquake which upheaved these mortared ranges. They are frankly utilitarian and frankly they take their colour from the stone or brick that lay to the builder's hand. We would not have them otherwise. The skyscraper that tries to put on archi- tectural airs becomes grotesque; it is as if we met with formal gardens upon the uncompromising ledges of the Matterhorn. It is for such touches of grace and beauty as Nature may apply that we watch with endless delight, as we watch the shadow anchors of the clouds trail over the slopes of the Great Gulf on Mount Washington. The Lower Island from the Ray and rivers is a perpetual revelation. Here the herded buildings are grouped like a titanic fist of mountains. On foggy days the Singer Tower and its sister peaks go up out of sight into the 22 NEW YORK vapours. Again, on days of heavy atmosphere and lower- ing rain, when the smoke from tugs and steamers hangs like a pall close to the water, I have seen the entire lower portions of the buildings obliterated, and only their summits reared on nothing into the gray air, a dream city, unbelievable, ethereal, immense. From the Jersey bank before sunrise the buildings are meaningless sil- houettes on a red sky, till suddenly the sun comes up, their cornices take fire, the cross streets are wells of molten gold, the third dimension springs into view, and we behold a town of Titans! When the early winter twilight comes, and the myriad window squares are all agleam, the city is again strangely converted. As the towering structures merge into the night and their out- lines vanish, upward rows of lights alone remain. Ris- ing so high, they converge in perspective, and from the deck of the ferry boat the lower city has exactly the aspect of a town of many streets running up a great, dome-like hill, each little house by the roadside imag- ined from its square of light. Indeed, the illusion is so powerful that you can almost see these houses! But most beautiful of all its aspects is its Japanese effect. That our great western metropolis should be converted into a Japanese screen is a curious thought. Yet you have only to go down the North River on a ferry boat some morning when the sun is shining through a slight sea haze to find the screen. The river is soft gray- green, with here and there a white cap like a flick of paint. The gulls flash. The upper sky is blue. And against this sky, over the soft water, the great, irregular wall of the Lower Town is painted in two dimensions AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 23 only, a blue as beautiful as the sky, a gray as soft as the water. The haze has obliterated all solids, wiped out all angles. The flag on the Singer Tower whips out its one tiny trumpet blast of red. From Canal Street southward the design sweeps up into greater and greater bulk till the penultimate panel is reached. Then it falls suddenly away, and on the last section of the screen are only the dancing waters of the Bay and the smoke trail of an outgoing liner, whispering to the spirit of far adventur- ing. This is our Manhattan. Have we no artists to catch it so, and put it forever on a screen? Storks and cherry blossoms are lovely, too. But this is at once lovely and majestic — and our own. Seen from a distance, the human element in the Lower Town is slight, and the elder buildings on the water front are indistinguishably merged into the towering mass behind them. But as your ship or ferry draws in close, as details emerge, as each structure takes on a personal identity, you see the human bustle on ferry slip or pier, you catch the swarming procession of black ants down in the canons, and you note the old build- ings by the water front, low and comfortable, while be- hind them leaps up suddenly a great cliff wall, the rampart of the new city. On the East River, where Joe Cowell, sprightly comedian, landed in 1821, and ate his first meal of crackers and cheese in a "grocery shop" near the foot of Wall Street, little water front blocks remain as they were long ago, built of red brick, dingy, obscure, forgotten. One might almost hope still to find a grocery shop. Beyond and above them leap the bridges. Far overshadowing them tower the skyscrap- 24 NEW YORK ers. Like the City Hall, they are the reminders of an elder day. It is never wise to scorn our past, but here in lower New York it is inevitable that we should look down upon it. "The old order changeth," indeed. Now we mimic mountain ranges. But Nature, unchanging, gilds them with her morning lights, and in the heart of Man still plants the sense of wonder and of beauty, that he may find them fair. Ill THE BRIDGES Ill THE BRIDGES In the little village of North Reading, in the County of Middlesex, Massachusetts, my grandfather many years ago had a blacksmith shop. When it was proposed to build the Salem and Lowell Railroad, a one track system connecting the mill city with the seaport a score of miles distant, and passing through grandfather's meadows, the village wiseheads used to gather in his shop and sol- emnly debate whether the iron supply of the country would hold out to lay the rails. Presumably there is enough steel in the Queensboro' Bridge alone to double track the Salem and Lowell. Our great bridges are commonplace to us now. When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1883 it attracted 28 NEW YORK world-wide attention. But the opening of its most recent neighbour to the north a year or two ago caused not a ripple in the city's life. As Carlyle said, the second sun- rise ceases to be a wonder. The Brooklyn Bridge, how- ever, has not ceased to deserve the most attention, for it remains the most beautiful. This is in part due to the exquisite curve of its span, that peculiar curve which denotes infinity to the human imagination; and in part due to its suspension towers, which are graceful, solid pillars of masonry instead of the less gainly and some- times trellised props of steel-work which carry the newer structures. There is a sweep and spring and grace to the Brooklyn span which make it incomparable among all the bridges of the world — gigantic efficiency wedded to perfection of form. From all points and angles it is beautiful. As you come up the Bay, it springs from the flank of the city as if it were alive, and sweeps high across the busy river into the town on the other side. As you stand in old Franklin Square, by the house of Harper, you see its great stone arches striding far above the spot where George Washington lived as presi- dent. As you go under it on the deck of a Sound steamer, you catch it, as it were, in full flight. Your stacks seem about to collide with it. A moment later and you are underneath. There are fifty, a hundred feet to spare! The great thing leaps clear over you in unbroken flight from shore to shore, a boulevard in the air. And at night how beautiful it is, its towers almost indistinguishable, a golden film against the dark, with the glow-worms of the trains crawling perpetually back and forth spinning an incandescent web. THE BRIDGES 29 Beyond the pioneer structure, within a quarter of a mile, comes the new Manhattan Bridge, no doubt more capacious, but no doubt less beautiful, for its towers are of steel instead of stone, and so less massive, and its curve a little less alluring, though still lovely. This bridge comes straddling over the Lower East Side tenements, and sweeps down into the Bowery at Canal Street, close to the old Thalia Theatre where Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest thundered. It has wiped out whole blocks of buildings on the final dip, as if reveling in its power. A mile farther up the East River, springing from the Island at a point where it pushes out an elbow, is the Williamsburg Bridge, also a suspension structure, with a longer span which has rather an awkward curve and therefore seems shorter. But from the Bowery, looking up a wide approach made by razing a half mile of tenements, the bridge becomes the great gateway of a boulevard, and the city about it seems planned on a mean and pigmy scale, awaiting the ampler imagination of the future. The Queensboro', or Blackwell's Island Bridge, which carries Fifty-ninth Street across the East River, is not a leaping span. It is a cantilever structure, a huge maze of steel, which straddles off the Manhattan cliffs to Blackwell's Island with a seven league boot stride, and then steps again to the Long Island shore, and seems to stretch over the lowlands to infinity. The top of this bridge is pinnacled like a Siamese palace, and it gains an added impressiveness from the old brick dwellings which sit on the cliff beside it, and the long, low struc- tures beneath it on Blackwell's Island. Some dark, omi- 30 NEW YORK nous day when thunder threatens, stand upon the Man- hattan clifT, where Fifty-eighth Street ends in a quaint court of forgotten houses, the relics of a Pomander Walk. The river below you, narrowed in by Blackwell's Island, is a cruel, steely gray, and the white caps start up vividly. The barred prison buildings are distinct and forbidding on their long checkerboard of green. A steamer passes up stream, close in, the escape from her long-drawn whistle that startling white of a mountain birch against a thunder cloud. And straddling above you, a gigantic mass of steel, is the bridge, striding anew from the midstream island and vanishing into the oppo- site flats beneath the canopy of the coming storm, a thing huge as the rage of the lightning, and almost as uncompromising. We must follow a long way up the Island and turn westward through the Harlem waterway before we come to the next straddling structure, for the low draw- bridges which intervene, carrying railroads and high- ways and trolleys to the mainland, are the common- places of any city by a river. But as we enter the gorge of the Harlem where the sharp cliffs of Fort George and the northern nose of the Island hem it in, we see High Bridge suddenly walking against the sky, a centipede in stone. High Bridge is an ancient structure, as old in form as Imperial Rome, but not, like the aqueducts of Rome, a ruin. Were some of its arches shattered, were ivy and mosses clambering up its pillars and verdure clinging to its level top, it might be an engraving by Piranesi, with the Polo Grounds at One-hundred-and-fifty-fifth Street and the howling baseball "fans" for foreground, instead Y *■ O r V ^ * £ S S ^ Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. Y * n Y* «* ^ o o * ^ # & s ^ Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. THE BRIDGES 33 of the feathery Campagna and a few Italian peasants. Yet there are compensations for the feathery Campagna even here, compensations of smoke plumes and steam jets, compensations of curving stream and high green banks and rushing trains over rails that glitter, compen- sations, especially, of ten thousand lights. High Bridge is a nocturne in black and gold when viewed from the bank just to the north, in the evening, so that it tells as a great silhouette against the dark, a silhouette of arches each framing some constellation of clustered lights along the river below, street lamps, ship lamps, locomo- tive headlights, all the illumination of the water front, with golden reflections rippling on the stream. The headlight comes thundering up the rails, drawing the golden glow-worm of the train. The red and green lights of a tug move up stream and a feathery mushroom of smoke is dimly visible. The lower edge of the sky is glowing with the reflection from the city. Along the level top of the bridge, lit with small lamps beside the walk, a few figures move in silhouette against the night sky. The great arches are Roman ghosts, yet strangely wedded to the present, doing their appointed work in a modern world of electricity. Indeed, this beautiful Roman structure striding the Harlem into New York was built for exactly the same purpose as the Roman aqueducts — which was, strange- ly enough, to carry water. It was not built to carry thousands of people, tons of teaming, trolley cars by the hundreds and elevated trains by the score. How ridiculous it is, after all, to reproach our bridges for not resembling the Ponte Vecchio, as we reproach our sky- 34 NEW YORK scrapers for not being the Palazzo Uffizi. The first duty of a bridge is to get the required traffic across the stream. When your stream is a mile wide, and your traffic meas- ured by thousand-ton units, the architecture of your bridge will vary accordingly — or so much the worse for you. We delight to see the multiple tall stone arches of old High Bridge stalking like a Roman ghost beyond the Polo Grounds, or stepping easily over the Empire State Express. They are equal to the task they have to per- form, and perform it with classic dignity. But unless we scorn the task that great semi-circumference of steel holding up a level boulevard a half mile beyond has to perform, we cannot scorn this new architecture of steel, this web of brace and counter brace that leaps in single span from shore to shore and has the equally precious beauty of power and efficiency. No bridges leap from the mortared flanks of our Island on its western side, perhaps because the Hudson is too wide, perhaps because the traffic does not demand it, perhaps because the recent subaqueous tunnels have made further bridges unnecessary. The "tubes" are not pictorial, but they put the traffic out of the streets and handle it speedily and on schedule, great express trains rolling away for Chicago and New Orleans beneath our houses and the Hudson; and they leave unobstructed the panorama of the river, southward holding tugs and lighters and ferry boats and liners on its ample flood as it drops down past the steel Sierras to the sea, northward washing the still wooded end of Manhattan Island and vanishing, a great blue pathway, into the haze, with purple nose after purple nose of the Palisades pushing THE BRIDGES 35 boldly into it, till they, too, have melted into distance. There is more sense of the sea on this side of Manhat- tan, and more realization that we dwell on an island. The busy ferry boats, scooting hither and thither like water bugs on a pool, and bringing each its hundreds of little black' ant people, give us this island sense; and it is on the western side, particularly, that we realize New York as an ocean port, that we see men going down to the sea in ships. In Marblehead or Gloucester you are aware of the sea on every street. You catch the glint of water down every vista, you smell it, the stores proclaim it and the passers-by. But on Wall Street or Fifth Avenue or Broadway the nautical atmosphere is not apparent — and that is as much of our city as many of us often know! But follow down the North River-front from Forty-second Street to the Battery, and you will catch the seaport flavour. You will behold such heaps and bales of cargo as you never dreamed, hauled by a wilderness of drays, and great docks walled like the imperial city of Pekin, and the towering bows of liners nosing up to the very street, and the four great funnels of the Maure- tania like monuments above the roofs. Be it bridges or shipping that connect our Island with the neighbouring mainland or with distant continents, colossal size and a new efficiency mark them — the effi- ciency of steel. Steel made the Woolworth Tower and the Queensboro' bridge and the tubes beneath the riv- ers and the Mauretania. Each one complements and completes the other, and their beauty must be judged by their fitness and efficiency. The first steamboat, the 36 NEW YORK first locomotive, was ugly, because it was not efficient. Today the giant liners are superb, seeming almost con- scious themselves of their conquering lines; and the great moguls that haul our fliers pant like beautiful live things at a water tank. They have found their type at last, and are supremely admirable. So the bridges which handle with the greatest ease the greatest traffic, which fling the longest spans from the flanks of the tallest city, will ultimately be judged by their efficiency. They have risen to meet a new condition, on a new continent, born of the dreams of a new nation. Why should they not possess a new beauty? To the eye which sees New York steadily and sees it whole, they do. IV THE OLD TOWN IV THE OLD TOWN During the opening years of the Twentieth Century I used to talk with an old gentleman who loved to muse on the days that are no more, the days when his family had a country place near the North River docks at Thir- teenth Street and the mail came twice a day by stage from New York, and when, as a boy, he went out with 40 NEW YORK his first gun into the woods where the old Seventh Regi- ment Armory later stood, close by the Cooper Union at the head of the Bowery, and shot a quail! Since then the city has gone roaring northward, mile on mile of solid masonry, far beyond these precincts. It strikes one today as ludicrously incredible that quail could have nested at Astor Place within the memory of a living man. What a boom town New York has been — and still is! It sweeps on perpetually, eating up fields and coun- try, and looking perpetually in process, perpetually of tomorrow rather than yesterday or even today. Yet it has left its oases of at least comparative antiquity. Like most boom towns, it has skipped perversely certain spots in its endless process of tearing down and building bigger. In those spots we love to linger, for their quiet, for their sense of other days, for the perspective they afford us on our larger and livelier present. Trinity Parish is responsible for several of them, for Trinity Church itself at the head of Wall Street, and old St. Paul's turning its back on Broadway, and St. John's northwestward on Varick Street, in a neglected and for- gotten part of town, where it maintains a precarious existence, periodically threatened with demolition, with the "Evening Post" and the "Churchman" periodically rushing to its rescue. Its beautiful Wren spire rises grace- fully above its Grecian portico, and it is flanked in front by two buildings worthy of it, the old Trinity Rectory and the Parish House. Up and down the street, however, the gracious dwellings are no more, only tenements and warehouses, and the park is no more it used to face. From the rear, you catch a view of it as you come down THE OLD TOWN 41 town on the Elevated — a brown wall, the bare semicircu- lar apse rising behind the wall, and the slender spire, framed between tenement fire escapes and variegated disclosures of domestic wearing apparel. Some day even the "Evening Post" will not avail to save it, and a towering warehouse will take its place. But we shall be the poorer without the glimpse of its ancient loveliness. A little farther north, where the numbered streets commence — where New York began to be "laid out," in other words — is Washington Square. Here poverty and aristocracy face each other across a green park and a fountain, and a University jostles a sweat-shop on the east. Yet the Square has its own unity of impression, and nowhere in the great town, perhaps, is the spring more vernal, the sense of ordered charm stronger, the feeling more pronounced that here, at least, is a spot which has found itself, which has been finished and had time to grow a bit of ivy. Thanks to the fact that the Sailors' Snug Harbor, which owns almost the entire northern face of the Square, has more income now than it knows what to do with, that incomparable row of simple, digni- fied, substantial red brick dwellings retains its unity of sky line and marble porticos, keeping the sense of or- dered, cheerful domesticity which belongs by right to a homogeneous society. The skyscraper is a thing of com- merce. It can never be reconciled to a right system of domestic life. Washington Square and lower Fifth Ave- nue beyond are the reproach of an elder and more beau- tiful way of living to our present generation of cliff- dwellers. How serenely these cheerful homes, conscious of their loveliness, look southward over the green 42 NEW YORK Square, and see the hosts of children play and the foun- tain like an opal ringed with the gold of tulips, and un- der the aged elms and the marble arch the green 'busses bearing flower gardens up and down — the gay hats of the passengers! Under that solemn Roman arch the Avenue begins, its misty vista framed by the marble blocks, the gay flags on the old Hotel Brevoort whipping out over a bit of green foliage; and looking southward again, through the arch, you may see, as twilight steals into the Square from the east and the sunset dies over the far hills of Hoboken, the cross on the Judson Tower twinkle into gold, keeping guard above the elms and the children and the teeming tenements below, from the same slender watch-tower that dreamed long ago above the plains of Lombardy. Behind the houses on the north of the Square, and west of the Avenue, is a quaint little court bearing the unromantic name of Macdougal Alley. It was once lined on both sides with stables; one or two of them, indeed, still house motor cars. But most of these stables have been converted into studios, and Macdougal Alley is now, perhaps, our nearest approach to a Latin Quarter; at any rate, it is our one spot where all the inhabitants live apart in a world of idealistic creation, and let the town flow by them unrecked. There are both sculptors and painters on the Alley. The open door of an appar- ent stable shows a glimpse within of white-clad Ital- ians "pointing up" a model into marble, or a sculptor walking 'round and 'round a mould of clay, or a head bent intently toward an easel, and the flash of a hand and brush. Here in the quiet Alley the artists' children Y * O V* * V> o z: o * ^ Hr & S ^ Missing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. * Y *°A r # A3 V> o z: o ^ Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. THE OLD TOWN 45 play unmolested, and a cat walks sedately up and down. The way ends against a fence. Over the fence nod trees. From either side the windows of aristocratic brick houses look down. The noise of the city is curiously hushed. It is an ideal spot for ideal pursuits, hidden in back yards amid the simplicity of stables. Westward from Washington Square lies Greenwich Village, its crooked streets mute witness to the days al- most a century ago when it was hastily settled by refu- gees from plague-stricken New York. The crooked streets of Boston are attributed to the ambulatory in- stincts of Mr. Blackstone's cows, those of Greenwich Vil- lage to the fact that the original house lots were taken up along the lanes and short cuts of a country hamlet. If you enter it on Fourth Street you will presently end up in Twelfth. If you enter it by Eleventh or Twelfth Street, you will pass between two blocks of pleasant red brick dwellings, with trees in front — that rarest of sights in our arid city — and here and there an ancient church with a Doric portico or a group of houses with triple rows of balconies across them, the wrought grillwork, ivy cov- ered, suggesting a southern country. Wealth still inhabits these cross streets well into Greenwich, and even after you have passed under the Sixth Avenue Elevated struc- ture the low, pleasant dwellings have few of the airs of a slum. Was our entire city once like this? Did we live in separate houses, with mottled shadows on our curb? We pass cheery little dwellings by a small park (in one of them Robert Blum lived and painted), and pass down crooked Grove Street, with here and there a six story tenement breaking the line of ancient red brick homes. 46 NEW YORK Presently, between two of these dwellings, appears a narrow opening. We slip through. Can this be New York, the New York we know? We are in a tiny, brick- paved court, surrounded by ramshackle, brick houses. In the centre of the court is a pump, the bricks green with moss beneath its spout. Lift the handle, and the water gushes. Out of that doorway a ragged child is coming with a pail. There is no hint here of the roar of traffic on distant Broadway. There is no sight of a sky- scraper. We have slipped back through that narrow gap behind us into a New York of fifty years ago. Only, we might add, we do not hazard a drink of the water. Pasteur has done his work since 1850! Northward from Greenwich Village, separated in the old days by farms and fields, lay Chelsea, both seeking proximity to the cool breezes of the North River, and both, for that reason, passed by when the town marched up the centre of the Island. There is a row of houses on West Twenty-third Street, the Portland Terrace, which still boasts front yards, and behind it a block of West Twenty-fourth Street is like a glimpse of some south- ern town, low, sunny, and sleepily cheerful. But the heart of old Chelsea is the block bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues and Twenty-first and Twenty-sec- ond Streets. The centre of this block is filled by the General Theological Seminary, with the old retaining wall of the Hudson still visible at its western end. The cross streets present two rows of well-weathered houses, still occupied as homes of comfort, although that in which a professor of Hebrew — of all people! — wrote "The Night Before Christmas" has been replaced by a THE OLD TOWN 47 "flat." A scholastic atmosphere still broods over this oasis, the stranger for the teeming commerce on the river and the teeming tenements to the east. The various buildings of the Seminary leave no strong architectural impression, yet they are academic and ivy-grown, with the mellow charm of age and association, while beneath their walls move figures in scholastic mortarboard and gown, to the call of a vesper bell. Doubtless unfairly, but inevitably, one thinks of the river commerce and the teeming desert of town which hem this academic oasis, and seeks a symbol of the de- cay of faith in the startling contrast. Here reclused stu- dents pore over Pusey and the Hebrew prophets, while tugs toot on the restless river and the Elevated thunders. One enters the gate, and leaves the noise and rattle behind. A youth sits at an open window of a dormitory, reading a book. A group in mortarboards and gowns pass to a recitation. A sober professor, absorbed with the traditional absent-mindedness in thought, crosses from his house. The eye rests on an ancient brick wall covered with delicate ivy. Presently there steals over the senses the croon of an organ. The last sound of the outer world dies as you enter the chapel. The fresh voices of the choir, the drone of the service, the bowed heads of the young soldiers of an ancient faith, the low light of afternoon strained through tinted glass, are all the sounds or sights that reach your senses. Here the old order changeth not. How restful to the spirit is this solidity, like "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land"! Yet these young soldiers must go forth into the modern world, into those teeming tenements, into the 48 NEW YORK marts of commerce, to bear a new hope for an ancient longing. Old Chelsea deserves to keep its charm of brick and ivy only so long as it sends forth soldiers whose message does bring hope to the modern world; and that message will not come from weathered stones but the hearts of men. Perhaps we must find in the end that our oases of antiquity are not symbols, after all, but only accidents that please the eye. Yet for some of us, to please the eye is no slight service. So, like most mus- ings, this one ends with a paradox. V THE SQUARES THE SQUARES In no part of New York, perhaps, is the need for a re- adjustment of the vision so apparent as in our two fa- mous squares, Union and Madison, strung on the artery of Broadway. Viewed from the water, the Lower Island rises at the end of a mile, like a natural phenomenon — a serried cliff, or mountain range — and necessitates no neck craning. Viewed from its streets, all the lines go 52 NEW YORK up as in a forest. But viewing the skyscrapers about Union and Madison Squares, we are at once far enough removed and close enough to sense the natural habit of the eye to view its surroundings in horizontal perspec- tive and to feel the new tug fighting this habit and carry- ing the eye straight aloft. Traditionally, a square exists lo make a pleasing ground pattern and to frame, in ho- rizontal perspective, the surrounding examples of ar- chitecture. Such a purpose both Union and Madison Squares served until the last decade. Now, almost in a night, the ground pattern and horizontal perspective are battling for attention against the new call of the upward sight line. Squares ten times the present acreage would be required to frame the new buildings in level vista and preserve the impression of ground pattern. So we have, in our squares, yet another startling contrast — a suggestion at once of level country and shooting towers; and Fourth Avenue, where once the old Everett House stood at the head of Union Square, has now become a mighty canon ending abruptly on a plain. You may like this or not, but you cannot avoid it. For better or worse, the majority of our streets and squares are as wide as they can ever be, and while it is conceiv- able that a twenty story city with streets and squares of corresponding width would retain the old effect of hori- zontal vision while gaining the new effect of massive height and size, and while we may sigh that ours ought to be that city, we still shall have to make the most of what we possess and, at the feet of our towers, rest our eyes on what green we may before the leap. Saint-Gaudens' alert and breeze-blown Farragut in Madison Square is THE SQUARES 53 indubitably less impressive at the bottom of a well, while the three hundred foot prow of the Flatiron Build- ing bears down upon it, with half Broadway in tow; and the lithe-limbed Diana on her Spanish-Moorish-Italian tower now shoots her shafts into office windows but half way up the commercialized Campanile close by. Sculp- ture belongs to the horizontal vision and the intimacy of ground plan. Yet there is compensation. Look where that same great prow of the Flatiron catches the sunset rose upon its western side, and over the haze of the city seems almost to lift its sharp nose forward! How grace- ful it is in its strength! And the commercialized Cam- panile, too, is rosy with the western radiance, flashing down the sunset farewell from its lifted lantern, while in the Square beneath already twilight has spread a veil of blue and the arc lamps splutter. We used to shop in Union Square, lingering over the latest books or passing between cases aglitter with jew- els. Now the shops have joined the march uptown, and wholesale houses have taken their places. The roll of carriages has ceased. On the southern side little moving picture theatres advertise their cheap and insignificant wares with a mighty display of electricity, and on a misty, wet night when the asphalt is a mirror their facades make a picture no film within could rival. To the east, the shabby row of old-time buildings shows a face of sleepy decay. It is on the west and north, espe- cially on the corner where Fourth Avenue makes its exit, that the modern town displays itself in rearing walls, dwarfing the trees and pansy beds and massing blocks of shadow with perpetual variety. Looking up 54 NEW YORK through the dusty green trees into the canon slit of Fourth Avenue, you see the walls of the two buildings which form the entrance pillars, startlingly white. But back into the gorge the mortared cliffs throw shadows one upon the other in great patterns of gray and blue and purple, and the vista finally melts into a dark, dusty haze suggestive of infinite distance. Meanwhile, far above the roofs, the white Metropolitan Tower to the north stands up and takes the sun. Always that tower, in this part of town, crowns the distance. If we go two long blocks to the east, into Stuy- vesant Square, where time-crusted dwellings still stand about and the old Quaker Meeting House quaintly re- minds you by its plain red brick walls of New England Andover, and the stunted spires of St. George's Church look down on the swarms of tenement children at play, still you may see above meeting house and spires the white shaft with its golden lantern. Come back now through Irving Place, where the ancient, peaceful houses are fast giving way to ugly loft buildings, to Gram- ercy Park, most exclusive of all our squares, since its pretty green garden is fenced about and only the sur- rounding householders have the key. Some attempt at real gardening is possible here. A few tall apartment houses have broken the sky line, but many of the older dwellings remain, some with swell fronts and window panes turning a faint purple in hopeless rivalry with Beacon Hill, and look benignly over the railing into the flower beds and fountain. The flags of half a dozen clubs whip out over Gramercy Park; cabs stand in front; liveried servants appear at the doors. A group of S. Y *°A V- V v> o ^ tV £ S ^ Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. Y * (1 V- v S o z: o ♦ ^ ^ Or £ S Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. THE SQUARES 57 immaculate children, under the watchful eye of a nurse- maid, play about the fountain. Your steps loiter uncon- sciously. This is not New York, after all. This must be a nook of old London or a backwater of aristocratic Bos- ton. Then you lift your eyes, and nearer now, more in- sistent, the commercialized Campanile booms up over the housetops half way to the zenith! When the Fifth Avenue Hotel was erected in Madison Square, a few years before the Civil War, the owner was dubbed a fool for building so far north. Now, fifty years later, the hotel has been torn down because it was too far south. A huge office building has taken its place. The towering Flatiron Building hauls Broadway and Fifth Avenue into the Square at one end. At the other, where until recently a row of Victorian brown stone dwellings proclaimed the aristocratic days of Miss Flora McFlimsey, a broken line of skyscrapers makes at twi- light a mighty screen of blue shadow. On the east Diana springs from her yellow tower at one corner, and the titanic marble Campanile bears its golden lantern seven hundred feet aloft at the other, taking poor Diana down a peg, to be sure, but unable quite to obscure her. Be- tween these two towers are yet others now, narrow buildings, either on the Square or on Fourth Avenue behind, piling up in a confusion of masonry that is, architecturally, mere upright line and window, while tucked away at their feet are the low, classic piles of the Court House and the Madison Square Presbyterian Church — marble statues and Delia Robbia pediment carved at the foot of a mountain range. There is still shopping around Madison Square, and 58 NEW YORK the roll of carriages and limousines. The human throng is animated, gay. The open space is wide enough to admit the sun. A fountain pulses under the trees and men and women loiter along the walks or chat on the benches. Under the trees, indeed, their foliage discour- aging the upward view, the Square still has something of its old-time aspect. You look out upon the roll of pleasure traffic, upon the breeze-blown Farragut, upon the pillars of the church, upon the white statues on the Court House, upon the arches and tower of the Garden. But always behind the church, above the throng, you sense a wall, and coming to an opening you lift your eyes to see the great Campanile heaving aloft, or the range on range of skyscrapers piling into the north, or the beautiful prow of the Flatiron bearing down upon you. There are bright winter days, too, when Madison Square is peculiarly attractive, just after a new fall of snow in the night. Men have already begun to heap the white snow up into conical piles on the asphalt before you are abroad. These piles are like Eskimo igloos, with incongruous motors dodging between them. Pres- ently along comes a man who thrusts bright red and yellow placards upon the top of each pile, advising us to attend the latest musical comedy. A little sun, and the piles melt down a trifle, so that the placards begin to tilt at a hundred groggy angles. The trees in the park space are coated with snow, the black under side of each limb and branch telling sharply beneath its white jacket. How beautiful a bare branch becomes when its line is thus accentuated! Is anything more difficult to render THE SQUARES 59 with a pencil or brush than the vital spring of a lateral branch, maintaining through a score of irregularities, even of sharp angles, the rhythm of its growth? A tree in winter, denuded of foliage, is stark and noble; but when it is coated with snow in the sunlight it becomes once more a thing of infinite grace and lightness, its tracery no less pleasantly contrasted here in the Square with the bounding walls of the tall buildings, than its leafy green in summer. When the winter evening comes the igloos gleam coldly under the arc lamps, but under the trees some boys have made a black, icy slide on the walk, and are flying along it with merry shouts. And once in the year, at Christmas time, a great Norway spruce sprouts with coloured lights and glittering tinsel beside the icy fountain, while the plaintive melody of ancient carols mingles with the city's roar. There are lowering days of mist and rain when the Campanile goes up out of sight into the driving vapours, and you wonder if the occupants of those offices on the top stories feel the chill of the clouds. There are misty evenings when the sky-borne lantern, without any vis- ible support, gleams like a great star in the sky. But the tower, and the whole Square, are most beautiful at the hour when the blue veil of twilight drops over the city, softening outlines, wiping out shadows, obliterating de- tails. Then the surrounding skyscrapers are flats of blue, stood on end, like a beautifully tinted screen placed about this oasis of green park and home-going hu- mans. Then the arc lamps splutter out, the trolley cars are golden, the illuminated clock half way up the Cam- panile beams like a benignant moon, the Flatiron is a 60 NEW YORK phantom ship, and only the white marble pyramid of the great tower far aloft is tipped with the warm rose of sunset, echoing that last red banner of the defeated day which may still be glimpsed down a side street, over the Hoboken heights. At that twilight hour the Square is its old self, intimate, human, but new-set amid blue mountain cliffs and under a mighty watch-tower. There is the little human plan and planting; there the heights and spaces of primeval Nature against the evening sky. To stand in Madison Square at twilight is to think New York one of the most beautiful cities in the world. VI FIFTH AVENUE VI FIFTH AVENUE If you walk up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Harlem you see much of New York in epitome, both the various phases of its evolution and the multitudi- nous aspects of its present. Here domesticity has made stand after stand against the encroachments of com- merce—and been worsted; each battle leaving its mark in dwellings converted to trade. Here church spires jostle with skyscrapers, here are the finest shops, here the most nearly incessant roll of pleasure traffic, here alike the canon slit and the bordering greenery of trees and park. The Avenue begins at the Washington Arch and for six blocks maintains, save for a skyscraper or two of recent construction, the pleasant aspect of an 64 NEW YORK elder day, flanked by fine old houses, an old hotel gay with white paint and green shutters, two brown stone churches with excellent English Gothic spires as yet un- dwarfed, and down orderly side streets the shade of trees. Then Fourteenth Street cuts across, like a Mason and Dixon line to mark commercial slavery. Suddenly Fifth Avenue is the bottom of a canon. The sunlight has disappeared from the pavement, the red brick dwellings are no more. The canon walls tower twenty stories on either hand, and the walks swarm at the noon hour with the outpouring of garment workers from the lofts. They are the commercial slaves, undersized, coarse featured, pathetic, jabbering in many tongues with Yiddish pre- dominating, and making the curbs almost impassable. Again at night they pour out and through the cross streets eastward to their tenement homes, the great immigrant army that makes our underwear and our disease, while we make money. In spite of the shadows that mass in the canon depths, this part of the walk up the Ave- nue is not pleasant. We come with relief into Madi- son Square, and greet the great white tower and the trees. Beyond the Square begins a stretch where the shops have triumphed completely over the aristocratic dwell- ings, tearing down some to replace them with tall build- ings, converting others into four stories of show win- dows where the pillage of the world invites a purchaser. There is a charm about these small shops made out of dwellings, which no modern department store can ever rival, and there is a richness and rareness in the goods displayed which suggest a collection rather than a stock FIFTH AVENUE 65 in trade, intimate and inviting you to browse. Here are neckties of a liquid loveliness calling to the male, and mysteries of white calling to his mate. Here are etch- ings by Whistler and Haden and Cameron, and vases of the Ming Dynasty and chairs from some ancient French chateau and screens from Japan, where silken rivers run through forests of bamboo while on the pebbled window floor in front ivory elephants march amid aged pine trees half a foot high. Wealth does its shoppings here, and wealth rolls by in its limousines and even con- descends to walk a bit at the luncheon hour. The shopping section is at its height, and the view of the Avenue perhaps at its best, on the crest of Murray Hill. Here the beautiful Gorham building, with its bronze cornice, is close by you, one of the most success- ful adaptations yet made of the tall steel frame to a new type of individual beauty. It has the sheer climb of wall yet it remains a solid, it carries ornamental sculp- ture (in relief) without making the ornament picayune, and there is about it a certain gray, elegant, rich simplic- ity which few New York buildings, new or old, possess. Look southward now. The white walls of Altman's store reflect the afternoon sun. The great, towering red cliff of the Waldorf-Astoria, its windows like a myriad swal- lows' nests in a Georgia river bank, casts a mass of shadow over the Thirty-fourth Street corner. Down the Avenue hangs a haze, pierced at intervals by the sun's rays shot through cross streets or between tall buildings. The skyscrapers, irregularly placed, are a procession of towers. Flags whip out into the sun, bright flecks of crimson. Far off, at the end of the vista, the haze is 66 NEW YORK brightened by the open space of Madison Square, and closing the view the prow of the Flatiron stands up and takes the sun. Now your eye drops to the street level, and you are aware of the endless roll of carriages and motors, the endless crawl of pedestrians, a black river moving through with flowers floating on its surface. At four or five o'clock of a bright autumn afternoon this river fills every inch of space, and to watch it dam up at the command of a traffic policeman, then break again and flow down Murray Hill into the southern haze, is to feel at once the vastness and the lure and the loneli- ness of New York. Just beyond, between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets, is the new Public Library, a massive design in marble. With the vexed question of the architectural success of this pile let us not wrestle. It is set, of neces- sity, close to the Avenue, so that it must be viewed obliquely, and many complain that the central portico, by being thrust twenty feet forward, cuts the design in half. Perhaps half a design is better than none, when it speaks in marble of the classic days, beside our modern thoroughfare. The portal is guarded by two recumbent lions, which have assumed a curious expression of philo- sophic mirth, not untinged with irony, at the human procession. Stand on the broad stone platform behind them, and you will view against the shop windows oppo- site an endless stream of hats and faces, chauffeurs' heads, lapdogs peering from limousines, perspiring dray horses, a green 'bus, more hats, more faces, till the eyes close for very dizziness. Beyond Forty-second Street, the war between com- ^ Y *°* r V A3 ^ * ^r S o z: o 4> Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. ^ t0 . r V V> o z: o 4> ^ ^ Tir s ^ Missing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. FIFTH AVENUE 69 merce and domesticity is still being waged, with domes- ticity losing ground all the way to the Plaza. Here are more churches, here side streets of endless brown stone stoops, here the Roman Catholic Cathedral with its slen- der twin spires, here the richest art shops, where "old masters" (some of them really are) look out upon the Avenue where he who runs may see — a museum vis- ited without interrupting your drive! — and here what remains of "Millionaires' Row," that collection of French chateaux and brown stone palaces which our wealthiest families built for homes but a generation ago, and al- ready are being forced to abandon. Then the Plaza! The Plaza comes upon you with a jump. It is the sudden apex of the Avenue. To your left is the largest of all the chateaux, a dwelling that fills a block. To your right are two tall hotels. Before you is the open square, at one side the towering white cliff wall of the Plaza Hotel, beyond it the green woodland of Central Park, and riding triumphantly down into its centre to meet you, Saint-Gaudens' golden bronze of General Sherman. Here is one piece of statuary even so huge a skyscraper as the Plaza Hotel does not dwarf. The gilded bronze justifies its colour if only by its power to catch the sunlight and focus the attention. A wrist of steel holds taut the bridle. The horse is crowding Victory off the pedestal by his superb forward urge. "It was like General Sherman to make a woman walk!" exclaimed the little old lady from the South, whose acid memories when she saw this statue rose superior to her aesthetic sense. But the world will soon enough forget those bitternesses, some saner Park Commission will remove the little trees which have been 70 NEW YORK planted in a ring about the pedestal, and this rider of golden bronze will forever march in triumph down the Avenue, fit symbol of the human will in war, beneath the shadow of a lofty building that is a fit symbol of the human will at its achievements of peace. Now the Avenue is bright with trees, for the Park flanks it for almost three miles on the west, and domes- ticity to the east at last holds undisputed sway, dwelling after dwelling of every conceivable design, yet all be- speaking a certain unity of wealth. Here let us strike off into Central Park, and view the Avenue from afar. You cannot know Central Park in a day nor a week. Its splendid area of eight hundred and forty-three acres, naturally wild and rocky, and laid out according to Na- ture's contours into lakes and walks and lawns and groves in the heart of a great city, holds many a trea- sured nook and vista which only patient research will disclose. The happy combination of artlessness in the Park with the formality of surrounding architecture is one of its greatest charms. The Plaza looks at its own reflection in a forest pool; under a pine branch like a Japanese picture, and over a snowy lawn, we see the facade of the Century Theatre; in spring we look down a green slope to a lake, and over the lake to a wall, and beyond the wall flows the gay traffic on the Avenue, while the golden dome of the Synagogue is mirrored in the water. At night the Park is a dim mystery under the moon, and the great apartment houses to the west a procession of ghostly liners going by, their port-hole lights agleam. From the Belvidere tower we look out over the Reservoir, seeing nothing but the gold-rippled FIFTH AVENUE 71 water and the distant trees — a lake in the wilderness. Yet a few steps through the trees, and the Casino blazes gaily, with motors purring up and under the table lamps the shimmer of glass and china and the faces of men and women. In winter the large lake almost under the shadow of the western apartment wall is a gay country scene, whitened almost to snow by the grind of ten thou- sand skates and alive with the swaying, darting, inter- lacing black swarm of the skaters. In summer, boats ply its surface, the sound of a band drifts over the beds of pansies and cannas, and on the eastern side of the Park, under the wall of Fifth Avenue at Sixty-sixth Street, a group of little old men silently and mysteri- ously play croquet beneath the trees, on turf that is for- bidden to the ordinary tread. No more silently, no more mysteriously, did the little old men in the Catskills play at bowls before the astonished eyes of Rip Van Winkle. Who are they? Whence come they? Perhaps they are ghosts of the old New York. They ought to have multi- ple breeches and Dutch names. The lions roar in the Zoo just south. The traffic rumbles in the Avenue almost above their bent backs. The nursemaids and children, the boys intent on nameless pursuits, pass by them on the walk. Yet still they drive their wooden spheres through the arches, click, click, click — silent, mysteri- ous, absorbed. On such a quaint, unworldly backwater of life does the great modern Avenue look down, as it marches northward past the Park, rising over a hill, dip- ping into a hollow, flanked by the home of our most publicly benevolent multi-millionaire and scores of his less exploited fellows, and finally ignominiously enter- 72 NEW YORK ing Harlem, where the green Park is left behind, and block on block of sardine apartment houses succeed. Let us leave Fifth Avenue in Harlem, to work out as best it may the new destiny of a civilization that needs must live in layers. The Avenue begins in the past, and ends in the future — which thing is a symbol. VII BROADWAY VII BROADWAY If Fifth Avenue begins in the past and ends in the fu- ture, Broadway begins in the strident present and ends in Albany. But we must preserve the municipal ameni- ties, and confine ourselves to Manhattan Island, on which Broadway is as the central vein of a long leaf. From the Battery northward beyond the City Hall, of course, Broadway is our deepest canon. Thence it dips down the hill to the ancient canal and runs straight be- tween tall lofts and wholesale houses to the gray Gothic pile of Grace Church, where it bends accommodatingly 76 NEW YORK to frame that slender spire at the end of the vista, enters Union Square, then Madison Square, and changes com- pletely its character. From Madison Square, or a little north, almost to Central Park now, it is a street apart, it is the Gay White Way, the home of theatres and frivol- ity, the highroad through Vanity Fair. "Broadway," indeed, now becomes less the name of a street than of a district and a peculiar society. The dis- trict is spreading down side streets to left and right. Almost daily some group of old brown stone dwellings is torn down to make way for a theatre or a restaurant or an office building where soon the myriad applicants for theatrical employment will crowd the elevators. The new building will rise from a deep excavation, strad- dling black frames of steel at first, and against the wall of the adjoining building will be pathetically exposed in cross section the ghost of the dwelling displaced — the holes of ancient fireplaces, the marks of stairs, the patches of gay wall paper, no two rooms alike, mute witnesses to an era of bad taste. Why has no Locker- Lampson of the present written the ballade of those ghostly walls? What cheerful fires once blazed in the chimney holes? What vanished feet went up and down those stairs — hastening to a bridal or slow with the weight of years? Every day, from that chamber with pink-flowered wall paper, some one descended to break- fast. Why should not the daily descent to breakfast have its ballade, too? The smell of coffee and toasting bacon, the freshness of the morning, the high hopes for another day, the loved faces awaiting us below! We no longer descend the stairs to breakfast in New York. We BROADWAY 77 have no stairs. We cannot afford more than one story. Who would find a ballade in going into the next room for breakfast? These ghostly cross sections are records of another way of life, and stare at us accusingly as we rip the dwellings down. Broadway itself seems to change less rapidly, perhaps because land is so costly there. Daly's and Wallack's Theatres, with their honourable traditions and poor acoustics, almost face each other below Greeley Square. But above the founder of the "Tribune" (guarding now the entrance to the underground tubes) tower two new hotels, facing to the west two tall department stores, and down a cross street are caught the gleaming white col- umns of the new Pennsylvania Railroad station. The Doges' palace where the "Herald" is printed has been put at the bottom of a well at last, for the department stores and hotels on Greeley Square are balanced by a great office building and a still greater department store be- yond Thirty-fourth Street. The canon has widened; it has not ceased. Here, at night, the Great White Way— which, to be sure, is golden— stretches north to the tower of the Times Building between and beneath a splendour of electric ad- vertisements that mocks the dark. Electric chariots race overhead. Great figures clad in incandescent under- clothes spar one with the other, proclaiming the flexibil- ity of the weave. A gigantic kitten sports with a per- petually unwinding ball of somebody's yarn. Brilliant signs announce farces and operas and musical comedies, and once in a blue moon the name of Shakespeare may make itself known in gold. Meanwhile along the walk 78 NEW YORK passes an endless throng of men and women bent on pleasure, and through the roadway rolls an endless stream of cabs and motor cars, jewels and white shirt bosoms flashing within. The gaiety used to cease at Long Acre Square — a fine old name sacrificed to the vanity of a newspaper! — but it no longer ceases there. Long Acre, converted to Times Square, is but a widening of the Gay White Way, with a score of theatres electrically beseeching down the side streets, several great hotels and theatres walling the open space, the tall Times Tower presiding over the southern end, and at the other, where a wedge of masonry comes down between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, a veri- table geyser of electricity — bubbling mineral water, foaming beer, disappearing corsets, displayed from the roofs like fireworks against the sky. And still Broad- way goes on, with the crash of music from cafes and the roll of motors, and not until the Park is almost reached are the senses allowed to rest. Here is a giddy stretch of thoroughfare, to be sure, like nothing else in the world! It is so entirely given over to pleasure, and to those whose business it is to provide pleasure, that even by day the chorus girl and the actor predominate on the walks, and the rest of the world seems either about to eat at one of the innumerable cafes or to buy tickets at one of the innumerable thea- tres. Because it lives so exclusively its own life, too, there is a certain solidarity about it, almost a neighbourly quality. On nearly every corner someone meets some- one else whom he knows, and stops to chat. Men and women walk past in groups. Stands of photographs in ^ Y * Of r V . — i ^ o z: o 4> ^ Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. ^ Y ^l r # V> o o >v ^ ^ *V ^ S Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. BROADWAY 81 front of the theatres display faces that are familiar and speak of the gay evening to come. Broadway, the theatrical Broadway, never sleeps; its life goes on in perpetual round, a world apart and sufficient unto it- self. When evening draws on, and the matinee crowds pour out of the theatres and the Opera House, congesting the curbs with gay and chattering femininity, it may be a sunset worthy of Turner flames down a cross street and pours a purple radiance over the Times Tower; but nobody sees. All are scurrying for dinner, in the brief hush before the electric signs flare on and the evening sport begins anew. Of the social side of Broadway a volume might be written, for this dominant atmosphere of amusement sucks in the unwary like a spiritual maelstrom. Talent after talent, more especially, of course, dramatic talent, has come under its influence and lacked the character to resist. Broadway forgets or ignores the existence of the rest of the world. The deep and humble emotions of life, the commonplace experiences of mankind, which are the stuff of the greatest art, are not within its ken. He who would write of them, or he who would portray them by voice and gesture, forgets them all too soon if he allows the hectic gaiety of Broadway completely to capture his senses, till it seems to him the heady vintage wine of life, making the rest but flat and stale. One has no more to dread from the vice of the Gay White Way than from vice anywhere and always. But from this exclusive emphasis on amusement one has everything to dread; and its influence is writ largest upon our stage, which caters too exclusively to this Broadway patron- 82 NEW YORK age. Moreover, it must be remembered by critics of our stage that New York's floating population numbers sev- eral hundred thousands each day, and a majority of these visitors are "here for a good time," as they would express it, when evening comes. Only the more frivo- lous theatrical entertainments appeal to them — a psy- chological phenomenon not unobserved in other capi- tals — and as their attendance is so considerable, the supply of frivolity is correspondingly augmented. Broadway is at its best pictorially on a stormy winter evening, when Opera House and theatres are in full blast, when cones of snow are piled near the curb like Eskimo huts, when the sloppy asphalt reflects the light from signs and windows, when the roll of carriages is incessant, and jeweled women with skirts held high dash from their motors across the wet walks to the theatre entrances, the snowflakes swirling in under the canopies to powder their hair. On such a night the myriad elec- tric signs aloft are less sharply outlined, and like King Arthur's helmet, make "all the night a steam of fire." Above them the rapidly condensing steam jets from va- rious roofs drift like banners of cloud across the white shaft of the Times Tower, now hiding, now revealing, a window square of pale blue vacuum light in the com- posing-room. There is a certain misty magnificence about the electric illumination and the towering hotels, defy- ing the dark and all the batteries of the storm. New York plays, as New York works, on a colossal scale. The transition from the Broadway of pleasure to the Broadway of cliff-dwelling domesticity is achieved by a mile of automobile warerooms and a fleeting glimpse, BROADWAY 83 at Columbus Circle, of the Park. The street widens when the corner of the Park is passed, a strip of green run- ning down the centre roofing the subway. The great apartment houses that begin in the Sixties gain, unques- tionably, in dignitj r and proportion by this broader thor- oughfare, over their fellows on the narrow crossways. They gain a second dimension of breadth to counteract their height, and Broadway seems less a canon than a highway planned on magnificent scale. If all New York, we sigh, could only have been erected on streets of such proportion; if it had only been planned like Columbus, Georgia! But this is a new world of domesticity we have entered now, though the stranger might not guess it. We are in "the Upper West Side," amid the modern cave-dwellers, and though our way is flanked by towering buildings twelve and fifteen stories high, each family occupies less space, perhaps, than ever before was considered suf- ficient for a comfortable home. There are rows of separate houses on many side streets, to be sure, but they are rapidly becoming the exception, not the rule. Where the rent of a house reaches thousands of dollars, it must always be the exception, not the rule. These towering apartments are but innumerable layers of little cave-dwellings, and daily the cave-dwellers descend by the elevators, and are shot down town to business, under the ground. In a very important sense, then, life has grown more restricted even while its outward sym- bols have piled into mountains as nowhere else on earth. We are here aware of a myriad men in mass, not of individuals. Yet even here, in the great upper reaches 84 NEW YORK of the town which we have entered, where primarily men have sought but a cliff cave to eat and sleep in, the rose of beauty blooms on the brow of chaos, and a little art, a little luck, and a good deal of Nature, have con- trived for the seeing eye vista after vista of delight. Let us turn west to Riverside Drive in our search for them. VIII RIVERSIDE DRIVE VIII RIVERSIDE DRIVE Hiverside Drive is an incompleted employment of a natural resource. Crowning the steep east bank of the Hudson from Seventy-second Street northward almost to the end of the Island, it commands a superb prospect of the broad waterway, the abrupt Palisades, and the yellow sunsets. Yet commerce was here before munici- pal conscience awoke, and preempted the narrow strip of land between the river and the foot of the bank, build- ing docks and a railroad. The green park which plunges down from the Drive is held back from the water by freight cars, locomotives, steel rails. Some day, perhaps, these tracks will be covered, that the park may seem in effect to extend to the water's edge; but this blissful time 88 NEW YORK is not yet. Our noble Drive sweeps above tooting loco- motives and belching coal smoke. That it triumphs so splendidly as it does is proof of what Nature has done for Manhattan Island. There is no uniformity to the houses and tall apart- ments which line the Drive on the east, facing the river and the setting sun. Indeed, would they be characteristic of New York if there were? They but carry out in dwell- ings the jagged sky line, the variegated colour, the sense of lift and drop, tower and mass and tower again, which marks the river view of the Lower Island. It was what might, without undue perversion of the truth, be called a false, or, worse, an unimaginative figure of speech Henry James employed to, as it were, hit off, or, in less expressive but perhaps equally correct language, de- scribe, the sky line of New York — that of an inverted broken comb. Our sky line has the irregularity of Na- ture, it is on so magnificent a scale. What, in a lesser scale, might conceivably be offensive, here is justified, as the mountains are justified for their caprices. Indeed, the sky line of Riverside Drive needs no justi- fication, even that of characteristic quality, if instead of advancing formally up the Drive by cab or 'bus we move leisurely on foot, our eyes alert for the charm of un- expected picture, our steps straying down through the park slope where a path invites, or even along the rail- road tracks and out upon the docks. The trouble with a great many people, even novelists, is that they are unwilling to exert themselves in search of the pictur- esque. It is the modern fashion to hunt beauty in a motor car — and beauty has fled to the by-ways. RIVERSIDE DRIVE 89 So the by-ways of Riverside Drive are its greatest charm. It is delightful to stroll up the walk beside the rolling procession of pleasure traffic on a sunny spring afternoon, sensing on the one hand the human stream and the substantial dwellings, and on the other catching through the trees vista after vista of the blue Hudson below, with lithe, white yachts swinging at anchor or the decked-over hulk of an old-time frigate, still formi- dable with forty gun-ports to a broadside. Is anything more attractive than the sight of blue water through the tops of trees, on a spring afternoon? That phase of the Drive, however, is comparatively conventional and park-like, even as the white, Grecian canopy of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument which cuts delicately against the sky where the Drive swings on a bend — the superb curve of a highway following the natural con- tour of the land. Let us leave the beaten path and drop down the bank through the trees, crossing the railroad tracks to a pier. Look back now at the Drive. Where is the charm of uniform sky line to compete with that sudden piling up into a mortared peak of the apartment houses above, topping the green park? A little foot bridge comes stepping out of the green on stilts, crosses the railroad track with almost a Japanese grace, and drops down to the river. The hats of the procession on the roadway make a thin thread of colour weaving through the trees. And into the picture, with a belch of smoke and escape of steam, comes suddenly a locomotive, hauling a train. If evening is drawing on, that smoke and steam cloud lays a puffy, buoyant belt of living shadow against the 90 NEW YORK lower trees, and, when the fire box is opened, the under side is lit with flaming rose. There are compensations in commerce, even on Riverside Drive! A spot where the new architecture has achieved an- other and more formal effect is at One-hundred-and- sixteenth Street. Here the crossway comes down a slope into the Drive, joined just before the Drive is reached by another street, the two flowing in with much the curve of a river, contracting and then expanding till the sides form two opposing semicircles. Around these semicircles are set two great apartment houses, or per- haps many apartment houses merged into two great circling cliffs. Retween these precipitous rotundities the eye follows up the roadway and sees the dome of Earl Hall filling the vista; and this while the beholder stands beneath green trees, with the calm blue Hudson to his left. Let us pass Grant's Tomb in silence. Just beyond, at least, an Architect who never fails us has been at work. Here the river bank swings in a trifle to the east and dips toward a deep hollow. We are at the northward brow of a height which commands an unparalleled prospect. Close by, splitting the Drive like an island, is an old Colonial mansion painted white, converted into an inn where the prices are in direct ratio to the eleva- tion. A flag flies on the green lawn. Then the eye leaps out to meet the view — the broad blue Hudson, truly called majestic, lazily melting into the northern haze, while from the far western bank nose on great nose of the Palisades pushes out a purple promontory, growing fainter and fainter into the miles of distance, till at last ^ Y *°A r # act S o o •V Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. * Y * °A r V S o o z: o & ^ He * ^ s ^> Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. RIVERSIDE DRIVE 93 they are lost in what seems a waste of water. Here in New York is that point which Ruskin insisted on in a picture, the point which lets the eye out, the point which whispers of infinity. The teeming town behind is for- gotten here. The soul has gone adventuring. From this point the Drive does not dip, as the land does, to water level. New York is equal to the task of spanning a few hundred yards of ravine! A steel bridge of multiple arches, the girders frankly undisguised, carries the Drive across high in air. It is a great road- way which crosses, and here again a great bridge to meet the need achieves the charm of its efficiency. If we leave the Drive and seek the street beneath, we see the motors rolling overhead, against the sky. Under the arches we see framed the humbler street traffic, a ferry slip at the river, and across the stream the upright Pali- sades — a spacious picture in a yet more spacious frame of steel, on the magnificent scale of modern New York. The Drive goes on up the Island now, repeating or renewing its river vistas and sweeping curves. Should you find a boat and row out into midstream on a hot Saturday afternoon in summer, you would see the park like a green embankment at the foot of a white cliff wall of tenements, and at the foot of the green embank- ment, on every string-piece and float by the water's edge, hundreds upon hundreds of bathers, looking from the boat oddly like bifurcated water bugs. Plop — plop — plop — they dive into the water as you pass, others in- stantly taking their places on the crowded float. All the city is bathing, it seems, at the foot of its own walls. The dancing waves, the gleaming, bifurcated water bugs, the 94 NEW YORK green Drive above, and then the white cliff of the apart- ments against the sky — that is the summer view of the upper town from the Hudson, unique, picturesque, and not without a certain comic quaintness inherent in the human animal undressed. The extension of the Drive also brings us into fast vanishing vestiges of the ancient regime, of the days when there were country mansions built of wood lining the banks of the Hudson, and the business men who dwelt in them took the morning train down to Forty- second Street where they transferred to a Broadway 'bus. The Drive swings high above some of these houses now, shutting out their river view or pocketing them, as it were, under its embankment. Not many of them, however, remain, and perhaps in another decade none will mark the passing of the older order, unless the soci- eties that bear his name rally to preserve the home of Audubon, near One-hundred-and-fifty-fifth Street and the Riverside Drive extension. This frame house, built less than three-quarters of a century ago, then stood on a pleasant, wooded slope near the water, with a country landscape behind it and in front the broad Hudson and the three-hundred foot wall of the Palisades. Now it is pocketed by the Drive embankment, backed by a mixture of classic museums and tall apartments, "and no birds sing." The incongruity of its already rather dilapidated wooden walls amid this great acreage of stonework is pathetically wistful. Spruced up, as the phrase goes, duly marked with a conspicuous tablet, and set promi- nently apart, it might tell the passing world that here once a great man dwelt. At present, however, it is sadly RIVERSIDE DRIVE 95 inexpressive to any but the chosen few who know its history. The more fanciful may fashion a fable out of the fact that one afternoon not half a dozen years ago a white-tailed, or Virginia deer, looking across from the Palisades at a point almost opposite Audubon's house, to the mortared palisade of Manhattan, suddenly took it into its silly head to pay the town a visit. It entered the water, and was swimming the Hudson industriously when the crew of a tug boat spied it, and with a hastily improvised lasso hauled the poor wild thing from the stream. It was not an escaped inmate of any zoological garden, either, but a true forest deer. But there is much of the Island to the east which we have missed. Let us retrace our steps a little, leaving the ravine beneath the arches by this forbidding gravel bank ahead. All Harlem was once such a wilderness of rocky cliffs and gravel banks, the haunts of goats and concealed squatters' shanties. Now they are being blasted and carted away or covered with streets and houses. But this one remains, rising abruptly from the grim gas tanks in a series of steep, irregular heaps of sand and stone. In the hollows are nomadic stables built of weathered boards roughly thrown together, and tiny huts of tin laid over caves scooped out of the bank. The faces of boys peer from these caves, and disappear again, like woodchucks. Other boys scramble on mys- terious and nomadic errands from mound to mound. Meantime, to the north, looking over this patch of waste and wildness in the city's heart, are the whitewashed rears of a long row of tenements, bare, ugly, uniform, 96 NEW YORK like some forbidding fortress. We might be storming the heights of Port Arthur, over ground ploughed and mined by the ripping shells. If you were a boy, you know that you would seize a stick for a bayonet and rush up the bank with a yell. Even as a man, you half expect to see a spit of flame from one of those forbidding tene- ment windows and hear the z-z-z-mm of a bullet. Yet look backward 1 Now almost level with your eye again, Riverside Drive is bearing its procession of gay pleasure traffic upon its great steel arches, and the Hudson rolls below. Your shoes are dusty and full of tiny pebbles, but you have seen another of those vivid contrasts, those stimulating surprises of the picturesque, in which New York abounds. IX KNbWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS IX KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS New York has crowned Morningside Heights with a cathedral, a university and a hospital — with faith, hope and charity. To that rocky ledge between the Harlem flats and the Hudson, above Riverside Drive on the one hand and the dusty green strip of hillside park on the other, apartment houses have climbed and gained a 100 NEW YORK foothold, also. Cathedral and university jostle with domesticity quite as in the Middle Ages — and, as then, rise above it and stamp this eminence of the town as their own. We are in cloistered and academic Manhat- tan, without the peace and age of the Seminary in old Chelsea, to be sure, a subway station on the one hand instead and a block of brand-new apartment houses on the other, and modern buildings naked of ivy, flush to the walk; but none the less bespeaking an architectural plan, and learning, and faith, and things less temporal than pleasure or commerce. On the southern end of Morningside Heights rises so much as is completed — the apsidal chapels, the choir and dome — of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A cor- ner of Central Park is close by, and the apse, from below, seems to spring directly out of the green wall of Morningside Park. Backed up, then, to the edge of a cliff, the Cathedral already dominates unchallenged the western sky line, and looks eastward over a sea of sil- very roofs, mile after mile, while the discontented coun- tenance of John Ruskin in the spirit land is crossed for a moment by a smile of satisfaction. The Cathedral, however, is not a high building as buildings go in New York. Even when its spires are erected, the Woolworth Building, or the Singer Tower, will far out-top them. Yet while we are accustomed to tremendous external height, it is a curious fact that interior spaciousness in New York is so rare as to be a curiosity, and the beautiful waiting-room of the Pennsylvania Terminal will be ever more precious as the years pass. The great dining-room of the Harvard Club is a constant source of KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 101 astonishment, too, and it is perhaps only too typical of New York that nine times out of ten the visitor remarks, "Three stories high! Think of all the rent you sacri- fice!" The interior of the Cathedral, of course, even in its incompleteness, brings with a hushed surprise the sense of vastness and aspiration. Inefficient Gothic though it be, even the monumental apsidal columns cannot crush the soaring lines of this interior, nor cause mere heavi- ness and magnificence to seem, as is so often the case with us, to ape the task of spaciousness. Without, the Cathe- dral commands the cliffs and is set as a watch-tower of aspiration over the silvery sea of roofs. Within, as well, it brings to the spirit the mood of upward vision and the religious awe which lurk in organ roll and sky-borne shadows. Fit spiritual companion to it, old St. Luke's Hospital stands almost beneath its northern walls. Columbia University is a true New Yorker; it has changed its residence many times. Now, at last, on Morningside Heights, it seems to have settled down per- manently. Alas, that when it settled here on the heights it could not have preempted more of the land, extending its bounds to Riverside Park on the one hand, and to the brow of the rocky cliff on the other! The Cathedral has by so far the advantage of it. Morningside Park is not much of a park, only a wisp or two of dusty foliage straggling up the steep rocks, with paths and steps to aid the pedestrian, and lamps twinkling against the cliff at night to guide him. But it would have served as a splen- did setting for the eastern building wall of Columbia University, which might conceivably have crowned the ridge for a quarter of a mile with architecture nobly be- 102 NEW YORK speaking its academic purpose. What a splendid thing that would have been! Now the university is almost hidden from the east by a skirmish line of apartments which have pushed up the heights and gained foothold along the top. Perhaps it is vain to speculate now. Like most American universities, Columbia did not anticipate its growth. As in all American universities, too, there are startling contrasts in its architecture; but the domi- nant impression when you draw close is one of plan and grouping, with the simple solidity of its great central li- brary as the key-note and a clean-cut efficiency and neat- ness everywhere. There has been here neither time nor space for broad, elm-hung campuses. This university is set amid a crowded modern city, and is the product of the hour. Yet the broad stone steps of the library, with their twin fountains and gold statue of Alma Mater, with their bordering hedges and groups of trees, the dome of the college chapel rising beyond, have a certain classic brightness, spaciousness and charm that make the scene both alluring and suggestive — suggestive of style, of high thinking, of academic seclusion even here in sight and sound of the roaring town. There is no inherent reason, of course, why ivy should suggest the study of Greek or differential calculus, or why elm trees should bring to mind comparative literature and analytic chemistry. Our universities, merely, have been long established, most frequently in smaller cities or towns where space and soil were to be had. The seats of learning that are to establish themselves in New York must work out other symbols, architectural rather than horticultural. The Columbia library and steps are an excellent beginning. ^ Y ^ A r V S o o + Or ft ^ <\ Missing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. ^^°l r V act v> O O o 4> ^ # ir s ^ Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 105 Within the university enclosure the town is not ap- parent. Between the close-set, solid, efficient buildings is the stir and hum of student life. Behind is a green park; and in a corner of that park, separated from Amsterdam Avenue and the trolleys and apartment houses only by a fringe of rusty evergreens and an iron fence, lies the lazy, bronze figure of the great god Pan, playing his pipes above a lily pool. There is something delightfully incongruous about this naked, peak-eyed pagan turning his back upon the town and piping to the dusty park. What has he to do either with the modern town or with those thousands of students passing through the walks, with books of science beneath their arms? "Great Pan is dead." A glorified test tube, or at most an inoculated guinea pig of heroic size, should be set here as a monument. But the eyes of Pan leer enig- matically, and he keeps his lips upon the pipes. Sensi- tive to sounds and sights, inquisitive, eager, poetic, wild — that was the heart of Pan. So, after all, is he the fit- ting symbol here — for that is the heart of youth, which dares to fly from the bondage of the commonplace and conventional, which dares to dream and be deceived, which still stands free from the "shades of the prison house." Play on, Pan, beneath your dusty trees above the city roofs, the song of the untamed spirit, for, as a grave professor who walks daily before you has taught, Truth is forever in the making, perpetually renewed, and only the untamed spirit shall follow her beckoning feet! Columbia University has fostered or attracted other institutions of learning about it on Morningside Heights 106 NEW YORK — Barnard College for women, across Broadway, on the battle ground of Harlem Heights; the Teachers College and the Horace Mann School; the Union Theological Seminary, now moved here from Park Avenue and in- stalled in a rectangle of scholastic Gothic so uncompro- misingly different, flush to the modern streets and de- void of ivy, that the eye cannot yet accept it into the scheme of things; and, latest of additions to the scho- lastic circle, the modest building of the Institute of Mu- sical Art. Standing beside the Union Seminary chapel, a little south of the music school, the narrow street ahead appears to run into a fragment of the primitive ledge, bending to the right and dipping down the hill. Behind the ledge rise the white walls of several distant apartments, grouping into a sharp peak. The dip of the road is abrupt. It plunges at once into the tenement city beyond. A few steps, and the scholastic atmosphere has gone. We are again amid the mountains of the cave men. But once more before we leave the Island does know- ledge triumph over the house-tops. New York City has its own municipal college, and that college it has builded upon a rock, a ledge which rises abruptly like Morning- side Heights from the silvery sea of roofs, with a green park clinging to it, and is crowned by the towers of the college as the other ledge is crowned by the Cathedral. The group of buildings which now house the College of the City of New York, like those housing the Union Theological Seminary, are rawly new. They, also, are a kind of scholastic Gothic, wrought of blocked, brown field-stone with glaring white trimmings which peril- KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 107 ously suggest a wedding cake. On three sides they form a rectangle, after the approved academic manner. But, on the east, where the cliff bends in a semicircle, they too follow the curve along the brow, forming here a great sweeping wall of masonry as superbly placed as any castle on the Rhine, and dominated by the lofty cen- tral tower. From far in the east this embattled wall and tower fill the vista of long cross streets between innu- merable tenements. Distance obliterates the raw mo- dernity. The college is an architectural beacon set upon a hill; nor are its portals closed to the poorest of these boys who play in the gutters. It looks down the long canons of the town, and over the shimmering house-tops, and says, "I, Knowledge, am still here, at the end of the climb!" It was a splendid thing for a municipal govern- ment so imaginatively to place its college, to dedicate to Learning one of its most magnificent building sites. One wonders how the miracle happened in New York! Now again we take up our northward march along the ridge of the Island amid the myriad cave-dwellings and the oppressive sense of a swarming humanity, while only here and there is a bit of green to shade the walks, or in some square beneath the shadows of tall apart- ments a classic building or group of buildings devoted to charity or the quiet researches of the scholar — the Hispanic Museum, the Numismatic Museum, and the home of the American Geographic Society, for example, with their treasured Velasquez and early editions of Don Quixote, and Roman coins, tempting the feet of the passer into hushed interiors, where they gather in the little Park that keeps green the name of the great Audu- 108 NEW YORK bon. But the charm of Manhattan, its picturesque sur- prises, its superb conquests of height and space, have not ceased yet. Wandering eastward, there is an old, white Colonial mansion before us on the brow of a hill, with the Harlem River suddenly sweeping into sight far be- low. Thither our footsteps turn. X THE END OF THE ISLAND X THE END OF THE ISLAND The Jumel Mansion crowns the bluff above the Harlem River at One-hundred-and-sixty-first Street. It is an excellent Colonial country house, dating back to 1758, when first-growth timber was to be had, the kind which lasts. From its doorway beneath the ancient fan-light, where now a portly policeman looks down into the base- ball stadium, once Washington gazed, and Lafayette, and Jefferson, and Talleyrand, and Louis Napoleon, and 112 NEW YORK Aaron Burr, upon the deep, wild gorge of the Harlem and the winding ribbon of the Kingsbridge Road. About the dwelling (now converted into a museum and so saved from destruction) are immemorial lilacs, and behind it an old-fashioned garden where dusty holly- hocks struggle up and iris blades screen a tiny pool. The peace of this little garden is worth the savouring; it tells us more eloquently than any exhibit of colonial relics within the mansion what the New York of today has been obliged to sacrifice. And it is a quaint and pretty starting point for the final stage of our journey. To the right, down a sharp, wooded embankment, lie the Speedway, the tide-water river, the railroad tracks beyond, and then the steep opposite bank. The earth has begun to show green. The packed town is behind us. In front the Roman arches of High Bridge walk across the gorge. We are treading a rough dirt way now, amid a tangle of old trees. Presently we come to the end of High Bridge, with its slender tower rising above the foliage, and walk out over the ravine, seeing the river vanish to the southeast into the wilderness of docks and tracks and bridges and warehouses and misty roof-tops, and seeing it sweep in the other direction up the gorge beside the white Speedway and under the great spans of the Washington Bridge. The wild park continues along the steep western bank till the Washing- ton Bridge is reached. Here we slip down a path to find one of the most delightful pictorial surprises of the town. In front of us the bridge leaves the bank by three great stone arches before the first steel span makes its leap. Above these arches roll trolley cars and motors THE END OF THE ISLAND 113 and carriages and drays, with a ceaseless procession of pedestrians beside the rail. The great structure is doing its appointed work. But the first massive arch which makes the work possible frames over its foreground of park a perfect vista of the winding river below and the high opposite bank up stream, green with aged trees and crowned with the classic dome of the New York Uni- versity Library and a hint through the foliage of the columnar Hall of Fame — a serene and pretty picture superbly set in utilitarian masonry. From the Washington Bridge onward the park is less apparent, and presently we come upon one of those quaint survivals of squatter sovereignty that are the more picturesque the more closely they are hemmed about by the town. Here, to the west, is a solid wall of apartment houses. There is a terrace behind them per- haps two hundred feet across before the bank plunges through the oak trees to the river. On this terrace, and on every smaller terrace down the steep bank where a clearing is possible, are tiny gardens — Italian informal gardens we might call them, for our squatters of today are no longer Celtic but Latin. These gardens are tri- umphs, too, of agricultural skill, since they are built on a rocky dump heap, with soil patiently carted from we know not where, nor would it, perhaps, be wisdom to inquire! Each garden is fenced with bits of broken board and dead twigs, tied together into palings, and as each is utterly formless, a group of them exactly re- sembles a jig-saw picture put together on the ground. Lettuce, cabbages, celery, corn, sprout bravely in these tiny gardens, and in one of them some more ambitious 114 NEW YORK and aesthetic Italian has sought to achieve formality and flowers. In the centre of his twenty foot enclosure, so far as a centre can be determined, he has erected a min- iature summer house roofed with sheets of rusty tin and crowned on the peak with a geranium growing gaily in a tomato can. Vines climb up the four pillars of this architectural triumph, and from either end emerges a tiny path bordered with flowers — several precious feet sacrificed to beauty where food stuff might be growing! Down the steep bank not only gardens find foothold, but a dozen tumbledown gray shanties, where black-eyed Italian children swarm and on the Sabbath, upon ter- races packed hard and smooth, the men play an odd game of bowls. But over every cabin clamber vines, geraniums bloom in the windows, and the surrounding rows of lettuce and the towering oaks below add their touch to make these squatter shanties exotic and pictur- esque, the more as the apartment houses close by above the bank loom ever like a battlement against the west, to remind us of the mortared town. A few steps farther, and we reach Fort George. This great nose of the bluff once held the cannon which guarded the Harlem River ravine. Now it holds that chaotic and curious collection of roller coasters and Ferris wheels and donkey tracks and shooting galleries and peanut stands and sausage shops and laughing, jostling people, which denotes the American idea of cheap amusement. Fort George is exactly like Coney Island, without the ocean. It is exactly like a hundred "amusement parks" near Boston and Washington and Chicago and other American cities. It is as hot, noisy, ^*^ r # V> o z: o * ^ * £ S S *V Mi mg Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. ^ Y * /- r V V> o z: o 4> >V ^ ^ * ir s Mi ing Pages These missing pages will be inserted at a future date. THE END OF THE ISLAND 117 vulgar, crowded, as those Oriental bazaars we journey afar to see — and just as picturesque. Those perpetually revolving Ferris wheels against the sky, those spider webs of beams and braces which bear the roller coasters on their perilous voyages, that great curve of the street which is startling with a thousand colours from the thou- sand gay and flashy little shops and booths, or at night a blaze of incandescent illumination, combine into such quaintness and animation as, in a foreign country, would inspire our magazine editors to send artists and descriptive writers post-haste to the scene. Nor is the classic touch absent, even here. Peeping through the spokes of a Ferris wheel or looking over the sloppy tables in a cheap beer garden, we see the calm river far below, then the distant green bank, and rising above it through the trees the University Library dome and the columns of the Hall of Fame. The academic serenity of that landscape is in strange contrast to its frame, in ironic contrast, perhaps; but the sense of humour which relishes a little irony finds it but fairer so. Fort George is, after all, an honest expression of one phase of our city life, and, like all things honest, it would have its peculiar charm and flavour were it far less colourful than it is. Beyond the Fort George ravine the Harlem River swings rapidly toward the Hudson, and the Island nar- rows to its end. The spinal ridge along the western side, viewed across a little valley, is capped by trees and large estates, the widely separated houses looking odd after the miles of crowded apartments to the south. In a green park down by the Hudson the old earth ramparts of Fort Washington are still visible, and the rocks go down into 118 NEW YORK the water. Here, indeed, the ramparts so screen the river bank from the road that once you have topped that green redoubt the city is put curiously behind you. Your feet are treading on slippery and unaccustomed shelves of rock instead of pavement. There is the smell of water, and the sound of it, too, as the waves lap in. On a boulder overhanging the stream sits an aged fisher- man, his bent back presenting to you the picture of a letter X, for the sun is warm and he has taken off his coat. He has no pole, only a line which he has flung far out and solemnly twitches from time to time, while a meditative puff of tobacco smoke rises from his lips. Perhaps it is a copy of Izaak Walton which bulges his pocket. Then, again, perhaps it is n't! Let us not too closely inquire, but continue on our way. The final nose of the Island is a wooded dome, where a few old- time wooden dwellings nestle in the trees and "Beware of the dog!" intimidates the trespasser. Some of the great tulip trees here must have been sturdy saplings when Washington's army fled into Westchester. The relentless march of town, the tide of commerce setting north and forever pushing the homes of its human agents farther and farther away, will some day wipe off these ancient houses, these tulip trees, this quiet piece of woods, and the last of the old regime will vanish from Manhattan Island. But that time is not yet. Manhattan still begins with a forest of skyscrapers and ends with a forest of trees. In the larger sense, of course, Man is but a part of Na- ture, and our forest of skyscrapers so considered would seem but a natural phenomenon, even if it did not, by THE END OF THE ISLAND 119 its spontaneous irregularity of growth, resemble even to the outward eye a mortared mountain range. But Nature in the narrower sense is something dear to Man as a thing apart, serene, to soothe and comfort. Once he dwelt close to it, even on Manhattan Island. Now he has but a wild corner or two of Central Park and these old houses on the northward nose of the Island, amid their groves of tulip trees and oaks, to remind him of those simple days. It is, indeed, a pity that houses and groves must go, that the great white wall of apartments which lines the river front below must some day be extended till the Harlem breaks it — and who shall say how far up the mainland beyond? No bird sings in the canon slit of Wall Street. Here, at twilight, while the pink sky of evening broods over the solemn Palisades and tints the bosom of the Hudson, the vesper sparrow pours his melody. We turn back to the subway when our walk is done, we are shot down town into the canon slits — and we are a little wistful. "Stone walls do not a prison make?" That was not the burden of the spar- row's vesper song! Yet, without this wistful call of glade and green things at the edge of town it may be we should fatten stupidly on our own content, and perish of our pride in this new beauty we have created out of steel and stone, this beauty of chaotic vastness, of stupendous efficiency, of magnificent materialism. New York is a new city, a city dedicated primarily to commerce and adapted to handle commerce on a new and undreamed scale. It has the beauty of an engine perfectly built to perform its ap- pointed task, and it has further, by its colossal height 120 NEW YORK and bulk, the primitive beauty of the mountain crags and gorges. It has the charm of surprises and the pic- turesqueness of variety and contrast; and it was built by the pigmy Man, who is proud of it. But out of the north- ern hills flows the calm blue Hudson to wash the wooded rocks at the end of the Island, to whisper of the silent places and of far adventuring. The Bowling Green and Spuyten Duyvil, the modern mart and the ancient forest, the two extremities of our Island, thus hold in epitome, perhaps, the dual heart of Man. The Committee on Publications of The Grolier Club certifies that of this book two hundred and fifty copies were printed from type and original wood blocks on French hand-made paper, and three cop- ies with progressive proofs on Japanese vellum. The ten full-page illustrations were printed by Emile Fequet, Paris.